Every morning, Alma spends fifteen minutes putting on makeup in front of the mirror. At first, it annoyed me, I gave her the refrain that men often repeat to their girlfriend: “You are more beautiful without makeup. She never listened to me, she mostly had answers to give me: “I’m too pale”, “You didn’t see the pimple on my chin”, “I have to hide my dark circles”. The only product she no longer slathers on her face is lipstick. I allowed myself one day to tell him that it did not suit him. The next day she threw them all away: the red, the brown and the black, and she didn’t speak to me for a week. Since then, we have never come back to this subject once more, there are certain drawers that it is better not to reopen. The grandmothers of the writer and journalist Rebecca Benhamou, they did not skimp on the lipstick: “For my maternal grandmother, the pigment was matte, contained in a golden and cylindrical case, applied with the greatest precision, facing the mirror, just before she sprays hairspray on her domed hairdo, the scent of which I would recognize among a thousand. My paternal grandmother’s red was as vivid as her character. Other women of my childhood painted their lips like one puts on a daily uniform (…) I observed them all with a mixture of curiosity and fascination. »
In her essay Sur la bouche, Rebecca Benhamou looks back on the “insolent” history of lipstick in Europe and the United States. A symbol of both the emancipation of women and their submission to canons of beauty, the writer asserts that this accessory “in a certain way always says everything and its opposite, almost simultaneously”, an accessory that the so we can only love. “From the right, from the left, feminist at times, patriot at others, acclaimed sometimes by the street, sometimes by the elites, he is as conformist as anti-system, good student as rebel. From the end of the 19th century to the present day, Rebecca Benhamou goes through great history through this “stick of red”: the two world wars, the Roaring Twenties, the stock market crash of 1929… until Trump’s mandate. We meet women with romantic lives, Victor Margueritte, the writer of the book La Garçonne, published in 1922, which tells “the destiny of Monique Lerbier, who leads a free sexual life, with both men and women” . Sold in a million copies, the book will be blacklisted by the Vatican, withdrawn from Hachette bookstores and its author will have his Legion of Honor withdrawn and excluded from his post as vice-president of the Société des gens de letters. We also cross paths with the fate of a black woman in the United States, Madam CJ Walker, alias Sarah Breedlove (1867-1919), daughter of slaves who became a millionaire, the “first female self-made millionaire”, hairdresser and seller of creams cosmetics for african american women. Rebecca Benhamou also recalls that even today, “lipstick is becoming a mouthpiece for minorities who have remained in the shadows for too long”. She quotes in particular a journalist of Filipino origin, Danielle Odiamar: “Until recently, I tended to keep my distance from lipstick (…) because I had the feeling of not being part of the small group that puts it and for whom it is perceived as an emblem of power and beauty. While Alma was putting on makeup behind me, I remembered that she would have liked to be a painter and that basically what she did every day was retouch the most beautiful of paintings, her face. I turned to her and dared to say: “Don’t you think your canvas lacks a bit of red? »
“Sur la bouche”, an insolent story of Rebecca Benhamou’s lipstick, Premier Parallèle.
Writer, journalist, photographer and curator, Sabyl Ghoussoub released her third novel “Beirut-sur-Seine” on August 24th with Stock editions, which is in the first selection of the Goncourt prize. He previously published two other novels with Editions de l’Antilope: “The Jewish Nose” and “Beirut Between Parentheses”.
Every morning, Alma spends fifteen minutes putting on makeup in front of the mirror. At first, it annoyed me, I gave her the refrain that men often repeat to their girlfriend: “You are more beautiful without makeup. She never listened to me, she mostly had answers to give me: “I’m too pale”, “You didn’t see the button on my…
