Never has an organ been more suggestive. Gateway to endless pleasure, erogenous and transvestite, lips are the expression of our mind and guts at once.
As they move in a sensual ballet, bite, suck and kiss, as they tease, dressed in creamy reds, ostentatious glosses and confident
tints, they signify the untold before words are whispered.
Alluring, seductive, they draw in. As lips press onto others, one can no longer decline the invitation to the other one’s mind.
Revealing in turns strong desire or disappointment, languish and trepidation, lips lure into the great, riveting unknown.
Red Scarlet, playful and poised at once. An audacious promise to provocative games to come, to the ecstatic state of the embrace. Impossibly seductive like the chanting of the sirens, they pretend to carnal debauchery and arouse until they freeze and take it all back. The cool confidence and sexiness oozing from these perfectly painted, vermillion red lips, does not allow food to pass, nor kiss to smudge away its sophisticated and trained perfection.
Powdered, blotted and repainted, lips become a mask to one’s personality. A sensual frame for a canvas, on which to paint endless fantasies, on which to reinvent oneself. A perfect opportunity to be someone else, to put on a mask and compose a new life.
Immaculate and closed to protect, sealed lips hold shameful secrets, contain rising anger, and all these words that can not be pronounced. Holding back until passion unleashes desire and greed.
The mask falls off.
Lipstick wears out when too much has been said, too much has been craved and satisfied. Not natural yet and definitely no longer smooth and flawless, texture and colour are now soiled. To seduce, lips are either perfectly glossed or natural. The inbetween state is louche and reflects a depraved, weak mind.
After seduction comes repulsion.
Bare and exposed to the reality, lips seem honest as love words are breathed by an enamoured pout. Liberated from controlled aesthetic norms and trends, strong is the reassurance that what one sees is what one another thinks. ‘For attractive lips, speak words of kindness’ once said the timeless style icon Audrey Hepburn, the attraction of lips is beyond cosmetic appreciation. What they allow to glimpse at is what is truly enticing.
Misery becomes poetry through enchanted, musical lips. Door to the silence, they hold mystery or as Leonard Cohen put it once, ‘silence blossoms like tumors on our lips’. Portal to passion, the way words are told and formed affect the recipient of the message emotionally. ‘Language is wine upon lips’, wrote Virginia Woolf.
The threshold of minds and emotions, lips open and close to the inner and outer worlds, liberating and exposing one to another. If women may still remember the first kiss after men have forgotten the last, lips are the sensory organ that allow this unity of souls, even if for seconds only.
So a monster would be the one without lips, stripped from this unconditional trait of humanity to never experience the blissful abandonment of the kiss.
