John Medaille wrote a wonderful article on cosmetics, and like always, it's never only about cosmetics. It's about philosophy, the cosmos, a prison in Columbia, love at first sight, and more. It's worth reading if you like art, if you have a mother, if you live in the cosmos...ok, I'll stop trying to sell this one.
Here are some thoughts and highlights for after you read the article.
“How mistaken I was. It was the lipstick…that could have changed their lives. Now I understood.”
What is curious about this statement is that she offers no further explanation about the life-changing possibilities of lipstick. From this, I draw two conclusions. The first is that for the women reading this statement, no explanation is necessary, and for the men, no explanation is possible.”
Allow me to suggest that a man and his ax are just as unexplainable as a woman and her lipstick. (What I really mean is, it is explainable :).
An ax is a sign of strength, of ability; it says, in a deep macho voice, “I am a man, and yes, I chop my own wood.” But while men are identified with strength (1 John), women are identified with beauty. Lipstick is a symbol of a woman's beauty, a reminder of who she is. It makes perfect sense then, in a place as unfeminine as a prison in Columbia, that lipstick would be important. They just wanted the bare minimum, just the shallow security that comes with a painted-on identity (even that would be better that what they had). At least it could give a kind of security, a reminder of their identity when they felt the most unfeminine and insecure.
We normally associate the word “cosmetic” with the superficial and the trivial, with mere appearances, but this would be to mistake the whole thing. For to understand the cosmetic, we need to look at its root word, cosmos. This word we often take to mean “everything” or “the universe,” but that is not correct. What the term meant to the Greeks was not “everything” but the harmonious composition of parts that produced a coherent and beautiful whole. This starts with the universe itself, in which everything is seen in its proper place, in its proper relationship to everything else, and therefore forms a beautiful whole. This cosmic beauty then extends down through each microcosm, each little part of the whole which displays its own order and beauty, and then right down to the little cosmos of a woman’s face. The need a woman has to order the world through beauty begins with the need to order her face.
From this habit of ordering herself (a habit which extends to women across all times and cultures) women move out to order the family. They take what resources they have, what gifts their men bring, what talents their children display, in what circumstances they find themselves, and try to compose all of these elements into an orderly whole. The habit of making up one’s face is practice for the task of making up the world.
Others might object that this is about appearances only, but appearances are all we have in the world. The cathedral is nothing but appearances, and we may judge whether the architect has truly captured the reality of the Church; the painting of the saint is just a bit of cosmetics on canvas, and we must discern the reality it depicts in its appearance. The bread of the Eucharist is just an appearance
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