Ivone Weldon: Not Jackie Stallone’s lips can be used as a flotation device in the event of a crash landing. Photo credit: Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com
Over the last century, women’s mouths have been getting bigger and bigger, Simon Doonan claimed at Salon.com.
What occasioned this mildly scientific cultural observation? Jackie Stallone’s lips – sort of.
At the Los Angeles premiere of Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables 2, Jackie Stallone, Sly’s indomitable mama, flounced down the red carpet with what appeared to be two very engorged leeches on her face. Everyone, Doonan noted, wondered, “Dear God, what has Jackie done to her lips?” Turns out, however, she wasn’t Jackie, but a woman called Ivonne Weldon whose son had worked on the film (Shutterstock, incidentally, still has her pegged as Jackie). Jackie, however, is possessed of her own set of serious smackers, so, wrote Doonan, “In other words, there is more than one person on Earth who looks like that. And this surreal game of cherchez la bouche got me thinking: How did we get to the point where such ferociously plumped trout-pouts have become a common sight?”
Doonan traces the evolution of female mouth from gloriously lipped Nina Simone and Brigitte Bardot to Naomi Campbell and Julia Roberts to, finally, Angelina Jolie, when “all hell broke loose”.
“Angelina Jolie’s shockingly sensual mouth eclipsed the Béatrices and Biancas and raised the bouche-bar to a new and irresistible level, However, by the time La Jolie became the woman every gal wanted to look like, cosmetic lip-enhancement was readily available. The natural beauty of the Jolie lips—I’m assuming they are God-given since they look the same now as they did in Gia—gradually got lost in a mire of copy-catting, confusion and collagen. Cosmetic fakery, combined with a rabid desire to look like Angelina, pitched women headlong into the era of the trout-pout. But instead of looking like Angie or Bianca or Béatrice or Naomi women began to resemble Donald Duck.
…Where will the lip trend end? Maybe we should ask Jackie Stallone. She, as you may well be aware, is an astrologer of long standing, and currently makes her living telling people’s fortunes by looking at their asses, an art she calls rumpology.
I am assuming, now that lips are getting so much larger, that lipology is not far off.”
What’s next in women’s lips? What do you think?
