Lipstick is a delightful short read that weaves together autobiography, testimony, history, and feminist analysis to celebrate the artificiality of women as a category, subject, and object....G'Sell's history of lipstick's power of reinvention, alongside her account of her own personal reinventions with lipstick's help, is welcome and edifying.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Foundation conceals. Mascara enhances. But lipstick? Lipstick transforms. That's the premise of Eileen G'Sell's brilliant ode to the most conspicuous of cosmetics ... A rousing manifesto.

Book Supplement Substack

G'Sell's book offers a rich survey of the powerful dynamics activated by this particular form of personal adornment.

Journal of Femininities

Lipstick is a dynamic and original read.

BookPage

Brilliant, biting, and irresistibly stylish, Lipstick treats beauty as the serious subject that it is. With deep insight, lyrical precision, and humor, Eileen G'Sell examines how painted lips expose the tensions between conformity and self-expression, beauty standards and personal agency. Less a book about makeup, and more about what we make of ourselves, this is cultural criticism at its most relatable and relevant.

Zahra Hankir, culture writer and author of Eyeliner: A Cultural History

What if pigmented wax was one of humanity's oldest technologies of honesty? In this homage to the form, Eileen G'Sell gives us a lipstick for all. Her elegant book not only lays out the cultural evolution of the object, but points to the expansively feminist ethics and latently utopian politics of colorful mouths. Pucker up, dive in, and dispel your femmephobia today.

Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms and Femmephilia