The mission came my way via Abhi over a month ago, a reader had contacted our comment line with the following:
The high-end cosmetics company NARS has a new lipstick shade called Hindu…I wonder how a shade called Jew or Protestant would fare in the public eye? Is the idea that all Hindus have temptingly red lips? To be fair, there are also shades called Afghan Red and Gipsy. What do you think?
Said Abhi, “This one is ALL you.” Said me, “HELL YES!” I love Nars. If I’m not wearing Chanel makeup, I’m glowing because of the most notoriously named blush of all time. One problem– “Hindu” proved more elusive than I imagined. It was sold-out all over town. The intrigue grew; if it was so desired, I had to keep it under surveillance for the sake of the Mutiny. I finally located a tester of it at Blue Mercury Apothecary (apothecary!) and made my way to my prey.
Part of Nars’ Holiday ’06 collection, “Hindu” had sold so well, it would take a month for me to procure one for the Mutiny. “Nars just didn’t make enough,” my source said, as they prepared the tester for germ-phobic me. I loathe such situations, because I prefer to examine communal cosmetics on the back of my hand. The allegedly-disinfected lipstick was headed right for me. I started to panic, but then I remembered that every Mutiny requires pain and sacrifice.
When she was done with me, I was wearing a very brown lipstick with excellent texture, which reminded of a sheer version of Chanel’s “Very Vamp”. I expected redder tones, not the muted brown which I was studying. I also thought there would be more glitter, since it’s very visible in the tube. The staff praised the end result; I was less convinced by the “Hindu” effect. Maybe for the office, but it was too dull for my scenery-chewing tastes. I was thrilled that it looked so good on South Asian skin, though.
“Would you like to be put on the waiting list?”
I hesitated; normally I would have politely declined, but Abhi had tasked me with more than just scouting “Hindu” out:
My biggest question is can a nice Christian girl such as yourself be labeled a “heathen” if they apply this? If you kiss a nice Mallu boy with “Hindu” lipstick on, what would happen!
In the name of the Mutiny, I gladly put myself on the line to complete this mission; alas, I did not find a suitable partner for such a life-or-death covert operation. Abhi, forgive me.
NARS lipsticks and blushes are da bomb, but they really do come up with the strangest “exotic” names. There’s a Calcutta and Bengal lip pencil and lipgloss respectively (I think in that order) that are a pretty deep brown too.
That “Hindu” lipstick looks more reddish and I like the sparkles. But it looks pretty similar to another one that I can’t for the life of me remember the name of right now.
A decent replacement for MAC’s discontinued “Terra”?
MAC lipsticks leave my lips a dessicated wasteland. shudder
Agree with Anna on MAC lipsticks. Though their Lustres are not as bad (Polished Up is pretty, especially).
Desi womyn need to move away from brown lipstick though, big time. And Aishwarya needs to get over her visible brown lipliner fetish, eww.
once again, it’s the E-word at play : exotic. Jew or Protestant– not exotic. Hindu, well… i’m sure in the mind of the “public” it conjures up images of Bollywood, bathing in the Ganges river, and eating all sorts of curry. therefore, a lipstick color named accordingly will sell, as NARS has found out. honestly, i feel caught between feeling happy that us South Asians are finally being acknowledged as a “people” and being annoyed that acknowledged seems to mean “co-opting aspects of the culture that look fun and amusing.”
catch-22, i think. can’t gain public acceptance without the “oooh, lookit!” phase. i don’t think. but it’s irritating as hell to be in that phase.
(FYI, for those of you looking for a lovely shade of sheer red lipstick, VIVA GLAM VI is awesome!)
A N N A — I take it then that your research did not answer the question of whether Nars “Hindu” leaves a mark on a guy’s cheek (or lips)? Some of us are curious about these things.
what, no pictures of your research mission, ANNA? 😉
A N N A K K A: I’ve boycotted Mac in favor of Sephora since our well-spent Saturday afternoon in Georgetown. Excited to head up to Blue Mercury and spread the color of my faith all over my lips in even, disinfected swipes.
From the Max Factor (not to be confused with Max Mueller) guide to the Upanishads “After opening that very end of the tube, by that way she applied the color. This is the cosmetc known as lipstick. This is pleasing. For that, there are three accoutrements; three kinds of dreams as: this is the lipliner; this is the lip gloss; this is the anti-feather emollient lip salve.”
Hindoo lipstick…t’was only a matter of time, lipstick being the cosmetic avatar of the lingam and all.
I bought it about a month back and it’s sitting eating dust. I did not like it. It’s too matte for my taste and matte is out. It’s great for the pasty face look with nothing but dark lips but on a brown woman it might seem to be a bit too overwhelmingly dark with our blue undertones.
It’s not brown, it’s burgundy. I keep promising Desi Dancer and a million other people that I’d do a whole cosmetics post with what to buy where and in what shades but I’ve been swamped. I swear I need to do this. And Pooja no this doesn’t replace Terra because it’s way way too dark for you. I know you won’t wear it 🙂
BTW Nars is one of the few cosmetic companies that names personalities for their colors rather than names of colors. They have Russian Doll, Shanghai Express as well as Catfight, Fire Down Below & Damage hehehe.
For some reason, this is reminding me of Revlon’s “Toast of New York”, that ALL the brown girls in my high school wore. I remember it was matte and more brownish/red of a tone than i should have been wearing, thus making me look jaundice in complexion. But alas, doesn’t matter now since i’ve entered the land of pink lip gloss and haven’t looked back since!
oh i discovered this last night in a sephora! what coincidental timing!
upon my discovery, i was a little taken aback, but i smudged it on the back of my hand, and well, the color doesn’t excite me. didn’t blend in well with my shade of brown. the name, yes, that excites me, sends me on a royal anti-orientalist fit, but i wouldn’t wear this color.
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet – Juliet
If it a good or bad lipstick does that make it any less or more offensive?
I’m looking forward to the “Muslim” shade. I hope that’s slated for the near future.
i was totally not happy when i saw this lipstick at sephora– i didn’t see one lying around called ‘baptist’…nars has some good shades but the marketing team needs to think of other names.
on another note– a totally great lipstick at sephora is called “Rouge Hyperfix” by Bourjois Paris. it does not come off! ever! “prune intemporelle” is a good tone if you have darker skin like me.
brown is beautiful.
I TOTALLY wore that lipstick. haha! flashback!
someone had the temerity to tell me i was “as beautiful as a china doll” once at a wedding and thought they were complimenting me. Duh. i mean, first of all, i’m korean-american, not chinese. i’m so over this exoticism nonsense!
For what it’s worth, sohwhat, I would never compare you to a china doll 😉
Please I had some moron at work tell me I looked “very Indian” that day. Pass the weed man. People say stupid shit. I save my ire for the seriously ignorant and blatantly racist and ignore the seriously stupid to address!
Show of hands, guys, how many of you had ever heard of “Nars” before this post?
Well I’ve heard of NASA. And I’ve heard of SARS. How am I doing so far?
china doll is not the same as chinese doll and i am sure the compliment referenced your most excellent fleshtone and it sure is better than being called ugly, notwithstanding the fact that you are no doubt of excellent demeanor and countenance thusly leading to random interface on your lookliness and i concur with you that the thread is all nonsense which is why you should consider donating to the llamas of hyderabad for they are a strange breed of ruminants.
not i and it sounds like a farmer john with the thumb pressed against one nostril. but this is a good time to remember a hair removal cream that went by the unfortunate name of Nads. some things just seem so funny when you’re sloshed 🙂
vere’s the pickle?
I too, am disappointed we couldn’t see pics of your research. I’d love to see a profile.
The visible lipliner thing on Ash is very ‘chola’. Someone should tell her that, that look is what gangstas’ latina girlfriends wear. Along with vertical bangs. 😉
someone actually came up to one of my co-workers about a month ago and told her “indian girls were really ‘in’ ” — like she was some kind of fashion accessory or something!! some guys have terrible pickup lines, but that ranks among the dumbest i’ve heard. we spent the whole rest of the night snickering.
Was it the sari you wore to work that day? Otherwise, I have no idea what that means. I mean, I imagine some of us may look “very Indian” all the time (I don’t, FWIW) by virtue of the fact that, well, we’re Indian (a.k.a. south asian). But I have no idea what it would even mean to say that someone looked “very Indian” on a given day. Or why someone would be possessed to say that.
I thought there was some sort of method to the pick-up line/compliment/ underhanded insult.
You mean, it’s just stupidity? I thought it was from some new dating method. If it’s just stupidity I guess I’ll have to back off on doling out the nerve damage.
Anna, you must have stocked up on JAIPUR glossimer? Tres chic on your skin-sessence.
No it was the person feeling stupid that day! Seriously I look like every average Indian, dark skin dark eyes dark hair and I look like that everyday. WTF.
At the holiday party (regardless of people being drunk) two people I KNOW thought I was SOMEONE ELSE…another Indian person. If you saw the two of us standing next to eachother we are so completely different you’d want to smack the person who would make that mistake.
I had it when the second person did it and let her have it. I couldn’t deal with that level of ignorance and worse not really giving a shit to make a note that we are two different people not one. I can’t begin to tell you how pissed off I was. The first person who thought I was someone else was comparing me to a woman who is nearly 6 feet tall. I’m 5’2.
I hate stupid people. Though I know far too many people that say inappropriate things and seriously believe they are being cool and complimenting you.
I just looked at the slideshow of this weekends meet-up. Everyone looks mucho fiiine! Que guapo, guys!
Again, guys – have any of you gotten that kind of a line? I rarely get blatantly exoticized, and it would be easy enough to do. The closest thing that happens is the way that men and women between 50 and 80 years old like to complement me on my turban colors, but these are pleasant complements, and never skeezy.
I’m missing out here. Somebody, please, tell me I’m looking really SouthAsian today.
I’ve heard the words Nars, Sephora, and MAC before, but this I never knew they were makeup stores until now.
Indian American but definitely not South Asian. Actually before I met you Ennis and saw you walking across the park I commented on your shirt and turban and something along the lines of “Check out that crazy Sardarji” 😉
OK, help me understand this (forgive me if I asked before): are you from Iraq, or are you from Iran? I can never tell the difference. Isn’t it all about the direction you wind your turban?
(Happy?)
Nope, haven’t heard of it, but its wortwhile keeping track of this trend, cuz, it looks like the liqours are going the perfume route – at 300 a bottle – and who do we have to thank for it? no less than our counterparts who wear makeup and are fragrant while we look bad, are vagrant and are flagrantly lacking in deodorant.
FWIW, brown/burgundy lipstick is not all that great a color on lips. Please take it with a grain of salt given that I am not a fan of makeup but purport to be aesthetically interested in beauty. Very light pink on women of chocolate to brown, while apple red on white/fair is great. I detest violet/purple.
We hindoos all look same anyway, so don’t worry about it. But the turban thing is easy to remember – you wind it one way in the northern hemisphere, and another way in the southern. It’s all about the Coriolis effect.
Rightie tightie, leftie loosie.
See, and there I was thinking it was “Hindis.” Learn something new everyday, I guess.
(Please don’t be offended if I ask again next week…)
I must confess a faux pas I made. I’d spent the week studying and attemtping to imitate antique Indian miniature paintings. Then I went to a recording session with a desi actress and a desi musician. And damn, to my weary painting-addled eyes, their faces really did look like something straight out of my art books. Their profiles, their eyes and eylids, the hollows under their eyebrows, all visually “explained” the peculiar stylization in many 18-century Rajasthani paintings, for example. So I said, “you look exactly like these Indian miniature paintings I’ve been trying to copy” or something like that. After which I considered this may have been a very stupid thing to say. But then I didn’t know how to ask if I’d offended – at that point I didn’t want to make it worse, and we had work to do. I did do the “how would I feel if someone said ‘you look just like this picture of a Jew/Russian/European I saw’?” test, and I wouldn’t have minded, but then I’m not regularly “exotified” so the context is different.
when were indian gals ever OUT?
Happened to me at my last job – someone kept confusing me with another desi woman who worked in a different department. After the squillionth apology for being called by someone else’s name, I told the guy, “That’s OK, you people all look alike to us too.”
I love me a Hin-doo.
My turnip friend I have newz for youz. Very light pink does not show on brown women. Why bother wearing any?
My favorite phrase from the Kaavya period : “voguish ethnicity“.
I’m not offended, only amused. I have a high tolerance for exotification — I think we all do it to varying degrees.
Does this count only for guys? I am a girl and I’ve never heard of Nars. [I haven’t changed the brand of my make up over the past 8 years.]
ummm…not really. you are right in that it is not a stand-out color. hmmmm…ok, fine, i guess the idea of wearing lipstick is to stand out. I will restate – I notice small things like eye shadow and very light pink lipstick and to me the subtle effect is much better than the strike-me-over-the-head-with-a-sledge-hammer approach – as I said I purport to be interested in aesthetic beauty and while I dont speak for every man, there are some men who will notice these small visual clues and think it is highly attractive. very light pink does show in brown women.
um, i second that, Janeofalltrades. pink looks terrible on a dark chocolate brown girl like me!!
it’s fun to wear the bright shades of red and purple if you have chocolate skin– why not show off some color and highlight our tone??
brown is beautiful.
This is nothing new. We’ve all seen or heard about our deities ending up on toilet seat, flip flops, bikinis, etc. But, I for one have had enough. For once we need to create same uproar that Muslims around the world created when a Dutch newspaper published cartoons of Mohammad. It is time we let everyone know there are certain boundaries you must not cross. I did my part by e-mailing the NARS’s customer service. Is it going to make a difference? Probably not, if I am the only one, but if everyone got involved and not blow if off as just another sales gimmick, NARS would be forced to change the name of the lipstick and realize that we a force to be reckoned with. Send your comments to: customerservice@narscosmetics.com
Men are from NARS, women are from venis.
now really!!!! does anyone really care where the image is or how it is used? is that how insecure a Hindu or a Muslim is? OK, I give up. I will NOT email nars. And I will NOT forward this to ten other outraged Hindus. And no, it didnt make me feel any better to vent.