The lipstick graveyard: Why we keep products we will never wear again

I found an old lipstick while looking for a hair tie the other day. This is how these things happen. You go in for something you actually need and emerge twenty minutes later holding a lipstick you bought three years ago. The lipstick was a soft brownish pink. I remembered liking it. I remembered wearing it constantly. What I couldn't remember was the last time I had put it on. I twisted it up anyway, inspected the slightly tragic little bullet and put it back.

 

You can tell a surprising amount about someone's life from the products they no longer touch. A particular shade usually belongs to a particular era. A glossy pink from the years when everyone wanted lips that looked permanently wet. A matte liquid lipstick from the period when eating dinner became a logistical challenge. A bronzer that is several shades too orange and somehow still carries the confidence of the woman who bought it. I once owned a highlighter so reflective that, in the wrong light, I looked less “dewy” and more “recently located by helicopter.” I kept it for years.

Beauty has always had this strange ability to turn a mood into something you can buy. Lipstick is especially good at it. Women have historically attached so much meaning to a tube of colour for a reason. Lipstick has moved through fashion, politics, and social history as a marker of femininity, glamour, rebellion, and self-expression. During the twentieth century, cosmetic companies increasingly introduced colours and products according to changing fashions, much as clothing designers did. A new shade could make last season's face feel suddenly dated. Beauty, in other words, has always had a little bit of fashion's restlessness built into it.

That might explain the strange feeling of opening a drawer and finding a colour you used to love. It isn't simply that your taste changed. The entire visual language around you changed with it.

 

Think about how many beauty eras we have already lived through without formally announcing their arrival. There was the heavily lined lip, the barely-there nude, the overdrawn cupid's bow, the glossy mouth, the blurred stain. Somewhere in between, our makeup bags accumulated the evidence.

We don't like throwing away things we paid good money for, particularly when they are tiny. A ₹1,500 lipstick somehow feels more wasteful than a ₹1,500 takeout because at least the takeout had the decency to disappear. The lipstick sits there, almost completely intact, reminding you of the person who spent the money in the first place. You liked the colour in the shop. You had a reason. You were probably persuaded by lighting designed by people who understand exactly what they are doing.

And beauty shopping has always been a particularly effective way of buying a little bit of optimism.

 

Research points to the so-called “lipstick effect,” the idea that consumers may turn toward relatively inexpensive beauty luxuries during periods when larger discretionary purchases feel less appealing. The phenomenon has been debated, and the explanations aren't nearly as neat as the phrase suggests. Still, the underlying idea feels familiar. Sometimes you don't need the dress. You need the lipstick that makes you briefly believe you are the sort of person who would wear the dress.

This is where my own beauty drawer becomes slightly incriminating. I have bought products for imaginary occasions with impressive consistency. The lipstick for the dinner. The glitter for the party. That is what makes old makeup feel different from ordinary clutter. It contains the possibility of a person you once imagined becoming.

I don't think that is entirely irrational. We keep old photographs. We keep boarding passes. We keep birthday cards from people we haven't spoken to in years. We keep a movie ticket because the film was terrible but the evening wasn't. Nobody asks these objects what they are for. The beauty drawer should be allowed the same indulgence.

Lead image: Pexels

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