According to foreign and domestic plastic surgeons, the modern fashion for plump lips appeared at the beginning of the 2000s and now this trend has already begun to lose its relevance.
One can speak about the ethnic characteristics of this preference only by considering the period before the spread of the mass media industry (the beginning of the twentieth century), which had a key influence on the popularization of this phenomenon.
How it all began
Some researchers of lip plumpness in the socio-cultural context of the era (in particular, BBC Future columnist David Robson) even recall the treatise of Aristotle and his students, in which they denounced the owners of sensual full lips in the presence of, to put it mildly, low mental abilities. And ancient philosophers called people with thin lips “proud as lions”.
Practicing dermatovenerologist and cosmetologist, candidate of medical sciences, scientific consultant of the Moscow REC "Expert" Maria Shirshakova writes in one of her scientific works that the fashion for plump lips arose even before our era. Even the ancient Egyptians tried to imitate Nefertiti with her "moderately full, well-defined lips." In ancient Egypt, women sought to emphasize the shape of their lips with the dark color of the cosmetics of the time, giving them greater sensuality.
The freedom-loving French of the 13th century had a reverent attitude towards plump female lips as an indispensable attribute of female beauty. One of the authors of the Romance of the Rose (it was written by two medieval writers, Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun in the first and second half of the 13th century) tells with admiration the “little mouth with plump red lips” of his beloved. In France at that time, full lips emphasized the exceptional beauty of their owner.
Then came a long period of enslavement of such a manifestation of female sexuality. During the Renaissance, master painters such as Correggio and Wai Eyck depicted the austerely thin lips of models. All carnal relations then in Europe were considered "dirty" and any public manifestation of sensuality was condemned.
Max Factor and his "rosebud"
The "lip revolution" took place in the first half of the twentieth century, and one of its pioneers is Maximilian Faktorovich, a native of Russia (the world famous Max Factor). It was he who introduced into fashion the shape of the lips, called the "rosebud". As Shirshakova writes, these and other popular variations of women's lips for decades, before the start of World War II, emphasized the inaccessibility of their owners, and this image was enhanced by the replication of cinematic images of popular actresses - Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich.
Fullness returned after the war
According to domestic and foreign scientists, the fashion for full sensual lips returned (including to world cinema) after the end of World War II due to the fact that at that time the image of a vamp woman ceased to be relevant: the war significantly reduced the number of men, and the ladies tried to attract representatives of the strong half of humanity by any "outstanding" forms. Merlin Monroe (née Norma Jean Baker) with her plump lips fully met the new requirements of the time.
Subsequently, the image of beauties with plump sensual lips was successfully supported one after another by Monroe's colleagues Brigitte Bardot, Mia Farrow, Kim Basinger
The era of plastics
As the Russian fashion historian Alexander Vasiliev once said, with the onset of the 90s, the African-American woman with plump lips Naomi Campbell began to be considered the standard of beauty - she set the tone for modern fashion just for this face shape. Experiments with the introduction of silicone for lip augmentation have been undertaken abroad before, but in the 2000s this practice became widespread, spreading all over the world.
As evidenced by the results of sociological studies, in the concept of a modern woman, beautiful lips are, first of all, full, they give self-confidence, testify to personal and social solvency. At the same time, the domestic and foreign press is replete with a mass of examples of inappropriate use of lip plastics in order to enlarge them - a person's appearance after such operations often changed so much that the patient was difficult to recognize.
