The Trauma of the Discontinued Lip Gloss
Trigger warning: this article discusses the death of several lip glosses and one eyeshadow.
I remember where I was when I learned of the death of Estée Lauder’s Matte Mocha lipstick, a dark, dusty purplish brown that stuck to your lips like a layer of crazy glue. It was 1990, I was in college at a fancy liberal arts school, and my friends and I had deemed it the only acceptable color to go along with our vintage rayon dresses and Doc Marten boots. Matte Mocha was the perfect send up of the traditional red lip: dark and dramatic, but a little dead inside too. We wore it along with a perfume called Antonia’s Flowers and created a small army that looked and smelled exactly the same.
One day my friend Ali and I walked to the local mall to replenish our supply. The woman behind the makeup counter at John Wanamaker’s paused, trying to figure out how to explain the bad news. She settled on ripping the Band-aid right off because she simply said “we don’t have anymore and we never will. It’s been discontinued. A customer just bought our last 24 tubes.”
I was 19 years old at the time, and the idea that a company would discontinue a product was deeply confusing. I grew up with products that never went away: Pop-tarts, Oreo cookies, Fritos. I wasn’t an economics whiz but I…
