So, I busted my lip walking my dog the other day. I’m healing nicely; but since then, I’ve been obsessed with lips. So I decided to put together a collection of lips in art. I’ve tried to include some awkward smiles as well. All pieces are for sale, unless otherwise noted. Simply click on the image for purchase info. I’ve linked some fun facts and cool information too!
This one is obviously NOT for sale. It’s a Warhol. I just thought it was cool. I couldn’t do an exhibition on lips without including him.
The Secret of Warhol’s Smiles
Humans are the only animal species with a “vermilion border.”
Many animal species have lips, of course. But only human lips have a distinct border between the pink part and the surrounding skin.
Why are smiles so rare in Art History?
Your lips are densely packed with nerve endings and neurons, making them very sensitive to pressure, temperature and other stimulations. This is one of the reasons kissing is so much fun!
The Open Mouth in Baroque Art
It takes a lot of muscle to “pucker up.”
To pucker up for a kiss, you have to contract your orbicularis oris muscle. Scientists used to think the orbicularis oris was a single muscle inside the lips. But now we know it’s actually a complex of four muscles.
Red lips can make you rich.
In a recent study from France, sociologists showed that waitresses who wear red lipstick earn bigger tips (though only from male customers).
Lips don’t sweat.
Why? Because they don’t have sweat glands. Since sweat glands also help keep the skin moisturized, that means lips tend to dry out faster than other areas of the body.
Lips get thinner as you age.
Lips get their shape in part from collagen. But as we age, the body produces less of this critical protein, and the lips start to lose their plumpness.
Did you know that our lips appear red-pink because we can actually see the blood capillaries that lie under the mucus membrane? Yes! The mucus membrane is pretty transparent. What causes this transparency? The skin on lips has only 3 to 6 layers of cells compared to 16 layers found in other parts of the skin. This makes the skin pretty transparent.
When it comes to attracting opposite sex, women with big lips get more success. The opposite is however not always true. Women are often found to prefer men with lips of medium size.
Humans possess a fleshy bump on their upper lips. This is known as the labia tubercle.
Texas-based anthropologist named Dr. Vaughn Bryant says that before the conquests of the 1500’s kissing was actually extremely restricted in Europe and Southeast Asia. According to Dr. Bryant, no one in the entire new world kissed. He says that it was India where kissing started and then it was spread by Alexander the Great’s soldiers who carried the kissing custom to their home.
The average woman spends $15,000 on makeup in her lifetime—and of that amount, $1780 goes toward lipstick.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and other early feminists painted their lips as a symbol of emancipation when they marched in the 1912 NYC Suffragette rally.
Both men and women in Ancient Egypt wore lipstick as a symbol of their status. They applied it almost daily with wet sticks of wood and favored colors such as magenta, blue-black, and orange—though red was also a popular shade.
In Ancient Greece, lipstick fell out of fashion among high-class citizens and was instead used to identify prostitutes. In fact, it was the law that prostitutes couldn’t go out without wearing lipstick, lest they “deceive” men.
While all other cosmetics were rationed in Great Britain during WWII, lipstick was kept in production because Winston Churchill felt it boosted morale.
Aside from the toxic ingredients we mentioned earlier, animal fat, sheep sweat, and ox marrow were also often used to make lip rouge. An ingredient that has stayed the same through the years? Fish scales, which are still used in lipsticks today to boost shine.
You owe your smudge-proof pout to a chemist named Hazel Bishop, who developed a formula for long-lasting lipstick while working in a dermatologist’s lab after WWII.
