Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh probably never thought his face would ever end up on a tube of lipstick, but thanks to the political lipstick brand Lipslut, now it does. Though, it's really not as flattering as he might have hoped.
The lipstick is a deep red shade named, quite succinctly, F*ck Kavanaugh. "After seeing Kavanaugh’s hotheadedness at the hearing, we thought a 'calm, cool, and collected' shade would be fitting," Katie Sones, the founder of Lipslut, tells Refinery29. "Imagine a cool-toned maroon."
From today until Sunday, all proceeds from preorders will go toward supporting anti-sexual assault organizations, including RAINN, NO MORE, National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, and End the Backlog. That's appropriate given the multiple sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh that are currently being investigated by the FBI as he inches closer to being confirmed.
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"While watching the hearing and the events leading up to it, I got so upset seeing women’s voices being ignored, doubted, and flat-out denied," says Sones. "If the highest levels of government won’t listen to us, who will? To me, this entire mess serves as a microcosm for how thousands of women’s experiences and traumas are treated everyday — we had to act."
This is the fourth political lipstick Sones has released since founding Lipslut in 2017 while she was still a college junior at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Its first lipstick was named F*ck Trump, with 50% of all earnings going towards civil rights organizations impacted by the Trump administration.
It also released a F*ck Hollywood lipstick in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, with 50% of all earnings going towards anti-sexual assault organizations.
Sones has been extremely successful raising this money this way. In August 2017, after a white nationalist gathering turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia, Lipslut launched a campaign that offered Charlottesville as a charity option for its F*ck Trump lipsticks, and raised $40,000 in four days. In June, when Trump's zero-tolerance immigration policies called for family separations at the border, Lipslut announced that shoppers could now choose "Fight Zero Tolerance" upon checkout of its F*ck Trump lipstick, and raised $100,000 in a few weeks.
"I know a lot of brands really don't take hard stances on political and social issues," Sones told us back in July. "But I think we’re showing the makeup industry that consumers want to support a brand that has an opinion. It feels pressing." It certainly does.