This week-end, I saw the Lipstick Portraits exhibit and since the old slogan “Better Dead than Red” has been popping in my head.

Like everyone else, I associated red lipstick with seduction without realizing what symbol it represents in other countries and in particular in Cambodia where young girls are forced to wear red lipstick when sold as slaves to brothels. The same red lipstick that offers a means of self-expression in one context can function as a marker of sexual slavery in another.

Michael Angelo‘s portrait series was inspired by Somaly Mam who was sold at the age of 12 to a brothel. After enduring repeated rapes and beatings and forced to watch her best friend being murdered, she miraculously escaped and since has dedicated her life to saving these children.

Michael Angelo’s portraits moved me more than I thought: I felt honored to be in a small financial way able to participate in Somaly Mam efforts, humbled by the sheer strengths and dedication some indviduals devote to others and finally immensely grateful to be reminded to celebrate the freedom I enjoy and too often often take for granted.

To make all these feelings as permanent as possible, I bought a photo of the Lipstick Portraits -they start at 125$ and 100% of the proceeds to directly to the Somaly Mam foundation. You can also get her book ” The Road of Lost Innocence” and buy plenty of cute & hard to resist items, a t-shirt of the exhibit, lipstick pens, jewelry and makeup.

They are on Facebook : Somaly Mam’s Fan page &  The Lipstick Portraits page

The Lipstick Portraits is a provocative collection of portraits celebrating freedom. Using red lipstick as a unifying motif and a metaphor for freedom, photographer and beauty industry leader Michael Angelo captures the individuality, beauty, and free spirit of 60 truly unique and inspiring women and men,. These people make an indelible mark on the world by finding their own paths and walking them boldly—by allowing their style to emanate from within, by using beauty and fashion to enrich the lives of others.

Currently at the 401 Gallery

More on the Lipstick Portraits:

This power that beauty possesses is double-edged. Its cutting moves in two directions. The use to which beauty and the tools of beauty are put often drives us to extreme and diametrically opposed reactions. For some, beauty is enticing; for others, it is alienating. For some, it is alluring; for others, it is utterly unapproachable. A beautiful image can celebrate the wonders of the world, or it can exploit them. What we take to be beautiful or what we are told is beautiful can liberate us to find the beauty in ourselves and others, or it can enslave us to unattainable canons of beauty over which we torture ourselves. At its worst, a perverted idea of beauty can be used as cover, deployed to provide a veneer of palatability on certain aspects of humanity’s basest impulses. Beauty can only be as noble as the heart that invokes it.

Red lipstick, arguably the unsurpassable symbol of feminine beauty, functions in just this way. For most Western women who wear red lipstick, it is an expression of freedom to present oneself as one chooses, to assert one’s power to act and think independently (though, to be sure, there often lurks here a desire to be fashionable, as well). For young women and girls forced into sexual slavery, however, red lipstick is the mirror image of this: it symbolizes their utter lack of freedom and their availability to be disposed of as a man who pays for the privilege sees fit.