Lipstick

Lipstick occupies a unique place in the material world of Gilead: it is at once a relic of a forbidden past, a tool of disguise, and a marker of the regime's hypocritical indulgence. For the Handmaids, cosmetics of any kind are strictly prohibited, part of a broader campaign to strip them of individuality and sexual allure. Offred notes that "such things are considered vanities" and that the Wives, who resent the Handmaids' reproductive function, have decreed "this absence of hand lotion" to ensure the Handmaids' exteriors become "hard and wrinkled, for all they care, like the shell of a nut." The ban on makeup is thus a weapon in the intramural war between Wives and Handmaids, designed to make the latter unattractive and to deny them any remnant of the self-adornment that once signified freedom and choice.

The Commander's Gift and the Performance of Disguise

The Commander produces a single tube of lipstick on the night he takes Offred to Jezebel's, the secret club where high-ranking officials consort with prostitutes. The lipstick is "old and runny and smelling of artificial grapes," a degraded object that has survived the bonfires of the Manhattan Cleanup. Along with eyeliner and mascara, it is all he has for her transformation. Offred, who has not worn makeup in years, finds her first attempt with the eyeliner leaves her with "a smudged black lid, as if I've been in a fight," but she wipes it off with the vegetable-oil hand lotion he has also given her and tries again, rubbing some of the lipstick along her cheekbones for color. The entire process is a clumsy, desperate reenactment of a lost ritual, performed under the Commander's gaze as he holds Serena Joy's silver-backed hand mirror for her. The lipstick is not merely a cosmetic; it is the key to a disguise that allows Offred to pass as a Wife, wrapped in a blue cloak, and to move through the checkpoints that lead to Jezebel's. Yet the disguise is also a humiliation: Offred feels "stupid" and later, seeing herself in the hotel bathroom mirror, recognizes herself as "a travesty, in bad make-up and someone else's clothes, used glitz."

The Taste of Forbidden Freedom

For Offred, the lipstick carries the sensory memory of a world she has lost. When she sees the Japanese tourist on the street wearing "lipstick, red, outlining the damp cavities of their mouths, like scrawls on a washroom wall, of the time before," she is mesmerized, and the "smell of nail polish has made me hungry." The lipstick is thus linked to the entire apparatus of female self-presentation that Gilead has outlawed—a world of choice, sexuality, and danger. At Jezebel's, the lipstick is part of the uniform of the women there, whose "mouths too red, too wet, blood-dipped and glistening" strike Offred as both "clownish" and deeply unsettling. The lipstick does not restore the past; it advertises a degraded parody of it, a performance of desire for the male gaze that the regime simultaneously condemns and secretly sponsors.

The Aftermath: A Token of Betrayal

The lipstick becomes evidence of Offred's transgression. When Serena Joy discovers the blue winter cloak stained with lipstick, she confronts Offred on the front steps, throwing down the cloak and the purple sequined costume from Jezebel's. "There was lipstick on it," she hisses. "How could you be so vulgar?" The lipstick, a tiny, intimate object, is the material proof of Offred's secret life with the Commander, the betrayal of the fragile trust Serena had extended when she proposed the arrangement with Nick. It is the final straw that precipitates Offred's fall from grace and the arrival of the black van. In the end, the lipstick is not a tool of liberation but a token of the regime's inescapable surveillance, a smear of color that reveals everything.