Lips apreciation day
<p>In the royal tombs of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s uncovered the burial of a woman now usually called Queen Puabi, who lived around 2500 BC. Among the gold, lapis lazuli and elaborate headdress was something smaller and stranger: cockle shells holding the remains of cosmetic pigment, including a red lip colour made from crushed reddish rock mixed with white lead. Nearly four and a half thousand years ago, a queen wanted her lips painted, and wanted them painted for eternity. Lips Appreciation Day, observed on 16 March, is a far lighter affair, but it points at the same long human fascination with the small, mobile, astonishingly expressive part of the face that lets us speak, taste, smile and kiss.</p>
<h2 id="a-feature-humans-have-decorated-for-millennia">A feature humans have decorated for millennia</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The lips have been a focal point of the human face for as long as people have made art, and decorating them is one of the oldest cosmetic practices known. After Puabi’s Sumerians came the Egyptians, whose aristocrats favoured red ochre mixed with resin, and whose most famous ruler, Cleopatra, is said to have made a deep red from carmine, the pigment extracted from crushed cochineal insects, blended with beeswax for shine. In each case the colour signified status and power rather than mere fashion; a painted mouth marked you as someone who mattered. The link between the mouth and identity runs so deep that lip ornamentation appears independently across cultures with no contact between them, from labrets and lip plates to the painted lip of the Greco-Roman world.</p>
<h2 id="a-modern-playful-invention">A modern, playful invention</h2>
<p>Lips Appreciation Day itself is a thoroughly modern creation with no documented founder or origin story, the kind of light-hearted observance that took root through social media and online calendars in the early twenty-first century. There is no need to dress it up as ancient; its honesty is part of its charm. Someone, at some point, decided that a body part this useful and this underappreciated deserved a date, and the internet, which loves a reason to post a smiling photograph, obliged. Like many such days, it sits in good company with other gentle, self-aware celebrations of things we use constantly and thank rarely.</p>
<h2 id="why-the-lips-deserve-the-attention">Why the lips deserve the attention</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Set aside the playfulness and the anatomy is genuinely remarkable. The lips are central to speech: the difference between “pat” and “bat”, or between making a sound at all and making it intelligible, often comes down to a precise movement of the lips against the teeth and each other. They form the seal that lets us drink without spilling and hold food while we chew. They are among the most densely nerve-rich areas of the entire body, which is why they are so sensitive to temperature, texture and touch, and why a kiss registers so strongly. And they are extraordinary instruments of emotion, capable of signalling warmth, doubt, amusement or grief before a single word is spoken. The same mouth that shapes language also delivers the affection and connection that sustain us, which is why a celebration of lips quietly overlaps with the deeper themes of wellbeing and human contact behind observances such as <a href="/specialdate/world-suicide-prevention-day/">World Suicide Prevention Day</a>.</p>
<h2 id="the-most-fragile-skin-you-own">The most fragile skin you own</h2>
<p>Here is the practical reason the lips need looking after. The skin covering them is far thinner than the skin almost anywhere else on the body, and it lacks the oil glands, sebaceous glands, that keep the rest of your skin naturally lubricated. It also lacks the protective layer of melanin-rich cells that shields skin elsewhere from the sun. This combination explains everything that goes wrong with lips: they chap in cold wind because they cannot self-moisturise, they burn easily in strong sun, and their characteristic colour comes simply from the blood vessels lying close beneath that translucent skin. They are, in short, beautifully engineered for sensitivity and expression and badly equipped to look after themselves, which is exactly why a balm and a little shade go such a long way.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-celebrated">How it is celebrated</h2>
<p>People mark the day in small, cheerful ways: treating themselves to a balm, a tint or a soothing lip mask, refreshing a neglected skincare routine, or simply remembering to drink more water. It is a natural fit for social media, where smiling selfies and photographs of colourful lip products do the rounds. For many it doubles as a prompt to express affection directly, a kind word, a genuine smile, a kiss to someone they love. Because the lips are the gateway to taste as well as speech, plenty of people mark it by savouring something they enjoy eating, the way others linger over a perfect <a href="/specialdate/us-national-guacamole-day/">guacamole</a> and notice every bit of the flavour passing the lips.</p>
<h2 id="symbols-across-cultures">Symbols across cultures</h2>
<p>The kiss, the most universal lip gesture, means strikingly different things in different places: romantic love in one culture, formal greeting between friends in another, deep respect when pressed to a hand or a ring, and in some traditions an offering of peace. The smile, by contrast, is among the few genuinely cross-cultural human signals, recognised everywhere as a marker of friendliness, though its rules for <em>when</em> to deploy it vary widely. Red lip colour, meanwhile, has carried meanings from divine power in ancient courts to rebellion, glamour and political statement in the modern era; it was, at various times, banned, taxed and embraced as a sign of defiance.</p>
<h2 id="lipstick-as-politics">Lipstick as politics</h2>
<p>The history of lip colour is not only cosmetic; it is a long argument about power and respectability. In Elizabethan England, red lips were a mark of the aristocracy and even of the queen herself, who reportedly believed in their near-magical properties. By the Victorian era the pendulum had swung hard the other way, and visible lip colour was associated with actresses and women of ill repute; respectable women applied it only in secret, if at all. The twentieth century turned it back into a statement: American suffragists in 1912 are said to have worn bold red lipstick as they marched, adopting it as a deliberate badge of defiance, and during the Second World War red lips were promoted as a patriotic morale-booster on both sides of the Atlantic, with the colour treated as a small act of resilience. A feature so tiny has carried an extraordinary weight of meaning, banned, taxed, mocked and celebrated by turns, depending entirely on who was wearing it and why.</p>
<h2 id="the-simple-care-lips-actually-need">The simple care lips actually need</h2>
<p>For all the cultural freight, looking after your lips is genuinely straightforward, which is rather the point of the day. Because they cannot moisturise themselves, lips benefit from a balm, ideally one with a little sun protection, applied before exposure to wind, cold or strong sunlight rather than after the damage is done. Drinking enough water keeps them supple from the inside. The common temptation to lick dry lips makes things worse, because saliva evaporates quickly and takes the lips’ scant moisture with it, leaving them drier than before. Persistent cracking at the corners can signal a vitamin deficiency rather than mere weather, and any sore that refuses to heal deserves a doctor’s eye, since the lips, with their thin and sun-exposed skin, are a site where skin cancers can appear. None of this is demanding; it simply requires remembering that the part of the face that does the most work has the least protection.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The reddish colour of lips is not a pigment at all but simply the blood vessels showing through skin so thin it is almost transparent, which is why lips turn pale or blue when circulation drops.</li>
<li>Cleopatra’s prized red is thought to have been made from cochineal insects; the very same carmine dye is still used today to colour many foods, sweets and cosmetics, listed on labels as carmine or E120.</li>
<li>The vertical groove running from the nose to the upper lip is called the philtrum, from a Greek word meaning “love charm”, because antiquity considered it one of the most erogenous points on the body.</li>
<li>An oft-repeated tale claims that a 1770 English bill proposed annulling marriages secured by a woman wearing cosmetics, treating painted lips as a kind of witchcraft or fraud; the story is poorly documented, but it captures how seriously some authorities once took the supposed deceptions of lip colour.</li>
<li>Lips can convey emotion faster than speech, and humans are remarkably good at reading micro-movements of the mouth, which is part of why video calls feel more connected than voice calls alone.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>It is easy to mock a day dedicated to lips as the kind of invented observance the internet produces by the dozen, and there is no harm in admitting that it is. But the impulse behind it is older than Sumer: the recognition that this small, fragile, endlessly expressive part of us does an outsized share of the work of being human. We speak with our lips, eat with them, smile and kiss and grieve with them, and we tend to notice them only when they crack in the cold. A day that nudges us to apply a little balm and pass on a genuine smile is, underneath the lightness, a reminder that the instruments of our connection to one another are worth a moment’s care.</p>
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