Lipstick

First Mention: Ancient Mesopotamia

Use: Various

From the studded star life of the celebs to the office and even high school dances, girls put on lipstick as a way of making themselves more attractive and professional(at least that’s what I assume). However it begs to wonder how many women actually know lipstick’s original purpose and how would that affect their current behavior.

To understand lipstick we need to understand the Romans, well we need to understand the Roman’s sex drive. Similarly to the Ancient Greeks, the Romans had a vigorous sex drive, from public “bath houses” to vases and dishes engraved with acts of a certain “taste,” the Romans had not only embraced the art of sex but they had endorsed it as well. Certain guilds (think of a guild as a club of sort where you enter as a student and are paired with a mentor who through work and experience teaches you the arts of the trade until you become a master yourself) were formed to accommodate the prostitutes of Rome. The mind now obviously diverts to figuring out just what sort of apprenticeship a prostitute undertakes but that is certainly left for a later post.

Now the art of love making was certainly embraced, but the Romans lacked a certain something modern society has access to now, rubbers. Birth control for the Romans came in the form of making love in somewhat taboo ways by today’s standards (Emperor Tiberius was known to invite little boys to his Imperial Villa in Capri where they would swim naked and try to bite and gnaw at him in the water as though they were a school of fish). But the predominate passages of entry in Roman time were anally and orally.

A problem sometimes encountered with performing Fellatio at the time was dry lips. Dry lips would obviously cause discomfort since the lips did not swell and moisten as readily as well other lips of the female. So the Romans, being the crafty group they are, came up with a moisturizing cream they would put on their lips, thus facilitate in the Fellatio process. The Guild of Prostitutes quickly accepted and implemented this new tool into their arsenal gaining quite the few customers to the point where they garnered royal attention.

The Empress Messalina is said to have issued a challenge to the Guild to bring out their “champion” to a “duel” in the imperial palace to see who could “satisfy” the most men. After a full day and a full night of “competing” the Empress “came out on top” as the “victor.” The use of lipstick obviously played a role in both competitor’s arsenals. Later on, Emperor Claudius killed Messalina for various reasons on top of the aforementioned one.

So there you have it lipstick, a tool of lust, seen nowadays as a tool of well lust – just in a more professional way. It is worth noting, accounts have been made of people in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt using crushed semi precious jewels, seaweed dye, iodine, and bromine, to decorate and color their lips and faces. However, that was not true lipstick in the sense of the word today. The Romans made the pasty stick we are familiar with now.