“The names of lipsticks and how they penetrate women’s psyches as semiotic tools used in branding are the foci of the present study.”
The professor’s study delineated 14 name-categories for the lipsticks, and then allocated the names accordingly – the results are listed here in order of their popularity.
• Food: 24%
• Color: 20%
• Sex and Romance: 10%
• Elements and Minerals: 9%
• Emotions and Characteristics: 8%
• Other: 8%
• People and Names: 5%
• Flowers: 5%
• Places: 4%
• Objects: 3%
• Darkside: 2%
• Arts and Media: 1%
• Birds and Animals: 1%
• Times and Seasons: <1%
Following the classification, the professor concludes that :
“When women ‘put on a face,’ or ‘put on war paint,’ they are not only acting in line with social prescriptions of feminine beauty, but are also involved in a system of meaning that helps them to navigate the sea of changing conditions that are a part of postmodern social experience.”
The paper : Truly Toffee and Raisin Hell: A Textual Analysis of Lipstick Names is published in the journal Sex Roles, Volume 56, Numbers 9-10 (2007), 591-600, and can be ‘red’, in full, here :
Notes:
• Since the survey, one of the lipsticks in the ‘Other’ category ‘But Officer’ has been withdrawn from production.
• The paper draws attention to potential shortcomings regarding the difficulties of categorising names which might fit into multiple categories e.g. ‘Rose’ – which could conceivably fit into Color, Flowers, People and names, Places, Sex and Romance, and Darkside.
• The website which was used to retrieve the index of names : http://www.thelipstickpage.com is now off-line.