The big idea: what my grandmother’s lipstick taught me about the past

When my French grandmother died a few years ago, I holed myself up in her bathroom. I took one of her many lipsticks from the makeup cabinet, studied its half-used red nub, and found myself instantly transported back in time. Back to all the mornings on which I stood next to her, wide-eyed and wondering, as she applied the colour to her narrow lips. I thought of her, but also of her friends, her neighbours, the French women of her generation. Of a particular idea of womanhood. At that time, few women left the house without lipstick; for them, it was a question of attitude and respect. A way of inserting themselves into the ranks of “decent women”, who considered it one of their primary tasks to look beautiful and neat. Those little tubes of metal, black plastic and mother-of-pearl didn’t just say something about one woman – my grandmother – but testified immediately, wordlessly, to what it meant to be a middle-class woman in France in the latter half of the 20th century.

History can be narrated in so many ways. We can write of battles, wars and conquests, of treaties that drew new borders and economic developments that changed the balance of the world. We can describe history as a succession of unique, extraordinary events involving unique, extraordinary people and, in so doing, narrate it almost exclusively through the powerful, the victors and – let’s be honest – the men. With some exceptions, this is mainly what we do. We learn names and facts by heart, make pilgrimages to monuments, convey our past in a way that makes it seem just as stiff and cold – just as dead, almost – as the materials chosen to embody it. We keep the past and the people who lived in it, who dreamed, laughed, suffered, hoped and loved at a strangely abstract remove.

Objects, by contrast, build an almost sensory bridge between us and our ancestors. They are, if you like, the very opposite of monuments. They aren’t large and conspicuous, rarely occupy much space in public, don’t scream “big history” in our faces. They are part of everyday life, not unique but usually reproducible and, by their very nature, often so trivial that we find it hard to imagine their having anything “important” to relate. We fail to hear the messages they send us from the past, because we haven’t learned to decode them. This is a shame. Because if we make just a bit of effort, look a little closer, prick up our ears and – as Neil MacGregor says in the introduction to his seminal A History of the World in 100 Objects – employ “sufficient imagination”, they can give us unexpected insights into past times and bring distant epochs to life.