EXHIBITIONS AND DISPLAYS

THE MYTH OF THE MOUTH

SASHA LEVAY

March 28, 2025

Lips are no longer just for kissing—they’re sculpted, plumped, erased, and redefined. Cosmetic injections blur the line between identity and performance, between face and facade. Here we look at three paintings of a kiss that reveal what the mouth hides and exposes: desire, artifice, silence, and spectacle. This is not just about beauty. This is about the myth we make of the mouth.

---

There is a certain kind of face that leaves no impression. You look at it once, twice, three times, and each time it appears slightly different, as if hovering at the edge of recognizability but never settling into memory. You tell yourself it’s the lighting, the angle, the way they’re wearing their hair. But it isn’t. The features have been pressed smooth. The mouth has been filled, shaped, staged. Nothing sticks. It is a face you forget before you’ve finished looking at it.

This is not a criticism so much as a condition. The face, in its natural state, is a site of subtle asymmetry—one eyebrow a touch higher, one corner of the mouth that curls in mischief or weariness or doubt. These are the things we remember. The smallest departures from the ideal. The flaws that form the visual grammar of a person.

When I think of how lips became a symbol of beauty, I think of René Magritte’s painting The Lovers (1928), that suffocating, impossible kiss between two people whose heads are completely veiled in white cloth. It is supposed to be romantic. It is supposed to evoke mystery, longing, the erotic tension of what cannot be seen. But all I feel is distance. Two people touching but not connecting. Lips covered, identities obscured, expressions erased. It could be anyone under those shrouds, which is to say, it could be no one.

René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928

We live in an era of perfect mouths. Or perhaps not perfect, but perfected. Volumized. Projected. Crafted. There is a look that circulates online and off which is neither natural nor surgical but something in between—what a face looks like when it is made for the camera but not for memory. The lips are always full, always symmetrical, always slightly parted, as if forever on the verge of speech or seduction. But the words don’t come. The lips speak only of themselves.

I used to think lips were about language. About articulation, about the shaping of sound into meaning. But lately they’ve become something else entirely—an object of display, a performance of beauty so complete it borders on parody. What makes this strange is not that people pursue beauty (they always have), but that they pursue the same beauty. The same lips. The same shape. The same curves. Over and over again.

In Edvard Munch’s The Kiss (1897), the mouths do touch—barely—but at the cost of everything else. Two figures melt into each other in a darkened room. The man’s face disappears into the woman’s hair. Their bodies blur together at the edges. You can barely tell where the kiss begins. It is a painting of fusion, of emotional collapse. A kiss not of recognition, but of erasure.

Edvard Munch, The Kiss, 1897

This, too, feels familiar. I’ve met people whose faces have been so modified that they no longer feel tethered to any one expression. The face betrays neither surprise nor tension nor even fatigue—it simply is, preserved in a state of high-definition neutrality. And the mouth, that old emotional compass, is the first to go. Lips, when overfilled, lose their movement. They stop responding. They become icons rather than instruments.

There is something tragic in this. Because what we long for is not symmetry, but specificity. We are drawn to others not because they match an ideal, but because they don’t. It’s the off-center grin. The uncertain smile. A lip bitten in hesitation or raised in irony. You can’t inject that. You can’t smooth it into place. You can only live your way into it.

We say we kiss to express love. But we also kiss to confirm identity. To say You are real, and I am here, and this is happening between us. What happens to that confirmation when the mouth is no longer a mouth but a mask? When the kiss is no longer shared, but simulated?

Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss with Tears, 1964

There’s a painting by Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss with Tears (1964), in which a man and a woman are locked in what should be a passionate embrace. But everything about it is artificial. The lips are huge. She is crying and her expressions are melodramatic. The colors are loud. It’s a kiss as advertising. An image countless times reproduced as prints, postcards, and posters. A kiss flattened into comic-book spectacle. Not a moment of intimacy, but a billboard for it. Lichtenstein understood something we’ve only just begun to confront: that desire, in its public form, is repeatable. Mass-producible. Aestheticized to the point of abstraction. And nowhere is this more true than the lips, which have become the most photographed, filtered, enhanced, and replicated part of the modern body. They are no longer sensual; they are symbolic. And like all symbols, they drift further from meaning the more often they appear.

People say the mouth is seductive. That may be true. But the deeper truth is that the mouth is vulnerable. It is soft. It opens. It receives. It says what the eyes will not. It ages before the rest of the face. It reveals where we’ve been and how we’ve felt about it. That is what makes it beautiful—not its volume, but its honesty. We live in a time that fears that kind of beauty. It prefers the frozen surface to the trembling threshold. It would rather repeat the known image than risk the unknown one. And so we inject, we conceal, we pose. We forget what lips were ever meant to do.

This is not a call to return to some imagined natural state. There is no going back. But perhaps there is a way to move forward with memory intact. To recognize that beauty, real beauty, is found not in repetition but in recognition. In the shock of difference. In the way a mouth can speak without sound. In the way it can say This is me, uncorrected, unfinished, unforgettable.

And maybe, in that, we can recover something the paintings still remember. The Magritte lovers whose kiss is blind. The Munch figures who dissolve into desire. The Lichtenstein couple caught in glossy performance. Each image is a warning. Each is a mirror. Each asks the same question in a different language:

What do we lose when we try too hard to be beautiful?

And what might we remember, if we let the mouth speak again?

Sasha Levay (b. 1983) is a Los Angeles–based essayist. She is the author of “The Art of the Kiss” (2021), a sharp-tongued meditation on intimacy, aesthetic ambition, and the theater of desire. It explores the symbolic power of lips and kissing from Cleopatra to Cardi B, tracing how the kiss has shifted from a sacred gesture to an aesthetic commodity. A collector of lipsticks, she considers shade selection a philosophical act. She currently teaches a seminar at Otis College of Art and Design titled Soft Power: The Erotics of the Image.

Cover image: KISS, electrifying the stage since 1973