Lipstick: Stacy Greene and the Sculpture of the Everyday

A lipstick is often dismissed as an object of surface—color, gloss, gesture. But in Stacy Greene’s hands, it becomes something else entirely: evidence. Her Lipstick series, launched in 1992, consists of large-format 20” x 24” color close-ups of used lipsticks, each one titled with the name of its owner. The form is simple, even austere. But the effect is immediate. Each image captures a fragment of identity made material—not in face or figure, but in wax.

What separates one from the next isn’t brand or shade. It’s shape. Pressure. Angle. Texture. Each lipstick is unique, not by design, but by usage. Twisted, carved, collapsed—these forms are unconscious sculptures, shaped by routine, by instinct, by private choreography.

Greene’s project began with an encounter: walking out of the Whitney Biennial in New York City, her friend Rosie dropped a lipstick. Greene picked it up, unscrewed the cap—and froze. The form, worn and uneven, struck her more than anything she’d seen in the galleries that day. That moment sparked the idea. A portrait not of the face, but of the trace it leaves behind.

The lipsticks are never new. They are already part-consumed, half-forgotten. Factory-made, mass-produced, and yet transformed into personal relics through daily ritual. Each one exists at the edge of the body—touching the mouth, shaped by it, slowly erased by it.

They are physical extensions of character. You see hesitation, confidence, carelessness. You see repetition. Intimacy. Evidence of contact.

Over time, Greene’s archive has grown—her gaze turning toward perfume bottles, synthetic lashes, press-on nails. Objects built for enhancement, for erasure. But in Greene’s world, they endure. Reframed. Re-seen.

Lipstick is not a study in beauty. It’s a study in residue. It captures how the smallest, most habitual gestures—reapplying, retouching, twisting shut—can shape an object until it becomes a marker of the self. A record of who we are when no one is watching.

What Greene asks us to look at isn’t the product. It’s what the product remembers.

Because sometimes, a mouth doesn’t need to speak to leave a mark. It’s already there—in the wax, the color, the curve.

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