Lip gloss and teen bonding

Meghan Markle, Kate Middleton and the ultimate symbol of teen girl friendship.

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Like most teenage girls, there was an ever-shifting hierarchy to my adolescent friendships. One of the ways I could discern my place in that hierarchy was through lip gloss. Yes, lip gloss.

Hear me out:

Girls you’d share your lip gloss with — these were your real friends. Your ride-or-dies.

Girls you wished you shared lip gloss with — those were popular girls; and/or girls you had crushes on. 

Girls you’d reluctantly share your lip gloss with (only if asked, and only then to talk to your real friends about how awkward it was) — those were people you might be friendly with but not friends friends. You’d dramatically wipe off the lid before using the tube again. 

Everyone else? Basically strangers. No sharing of gloss. 

I carried this sickeningly sweet goop everywhere from approximately 2000-2003

There were also other girls, those who had actually listened during health class, who didn’t share lip gloss at all. (These were probably the lucky few who avoided the school-wide outbreak of oral herpes during my sophomore year.) But I certainly didn’t know any of these people. Because to me and my 90s-era girlfriends, the strange but intimate teenage bonding ritual of sharing lip gloss was the difference between friends you’d have for life and those who wore off like the label of the Dr. Pepper-flavored LipSmacker I recently found wedged in a bathroom drawer. 

This was one of the many so-petty-we-can’t-stop-reading revelations of Spare, the memoir by Prince Harry, in which he describes an event, sometime in 2018, in which Meg forgot her gloss. Thinking, as a girl raised in California in the 90s and early 2000s might, that her soon-to-be sister-in-law would be happy to loan her some — or, perhaps, wanting to extend an olive branch in this seemingly icy relationship — Meg asked if she could borrow Kate’s, who reluctantly fished into her purse and handed over a tube. “Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips,” Harry writes. “Kate grimaced.”

Ouch.

Lips Smackers, Wet n Wild, Juicy Tubes, Lip Venom, or this off-brand Bonne Bell… Who’s to say which lip gloss reigned supreme?

Now look, we all have funny rituals from our adolescent years that signify status, establish closeness, and show intimacy. It just so happens that this particular one — the sharing of gloss — happened to be the girl bonding ritual of my era.

As I write in a column in this week’s NY Times, lip gloss was more than just makeup; it was friendship. It was a language we spoke to one another in. It was akin to telling secrets.

Keep reading here!

ugh, as if … I’d be caught dead without a glossy lip in high school!