Isamaya Ffrench on the Dream That Inspired Her Controversial Penis-Shaped Lipsticks
Is that a lipstick in your pocket, or is the pleasure entirely yours? When Isamaya Ffrench releases a pair of lipsticks shaped like massive metal penises, she isn’t angling for cheap shock. She’s blowing up the idea that women should tiptoe around sex, power, and pleasure.
For decades, beauty has coached us to suggest desire shade names like "Orgasm," packaging that flirts but never speaks plainly. Ffrench cuts straight through the coyness with LIPS, her third ISAMAYA Beauty collection. This time there's no whispering, no wink-wink euphemisms. She's dropping a 10-ounce, solid-metal phallus onto the vanity and saying, " Deal with it."
Isamaya's campaign for LIPS. (Isamaya)
The idea, she says, came "in a dream," the kind we're taught to smother under politeness and shopping lists. Cast in gleaming zamak and heavy enough to feel like an object of real consequence, the tubes don't hide, soften, or apologize. They stand as sculpted defiance: beauty as provocation, sexuality with literal weight.
Ffrench even laughs about the design meetings where she and her team discussed proportions with anatomical precision, turning taboo into technical spec. And why shouldn't they? Women dissecting the symbols that have defined them for centuries, this time with full ownership, feels like the point.
This isn't new terrain for her. The INDUSTRIAL collection, with its latex, its metal, its BDSM-coded intensity, was the opening act. LIPS is the escalation. The confrontation. The dare.
Because here's the truth: you might assume these lipsticks belong hidden in a bedside drawer, tucked away like contraband. Ffrench vehemently disagrees. "I just can't wait to see someone taking LIPS out of their bag and applying it on the train."
Imagine it: a woman on public transit, casually pulling out a giant phallic lipstick, uncapping it without flinching, painting her mouth the color of revolution while the world stares. At that moment, the refusal to shrink is the real artwork.
And this is what women know in our bones: rebellion isn't always a scream. Sometimes it's a slow, deliberate swipe of lipstick using an object the world never intended you to wield with pride. It's choosing to be seen. To provoke. To reclaim every inch of territory called "too explicit," "too loud," "too much."
Isamaya's campaign for LIPS. (Isamaya)