Gloria Steinem Hates Lipstick But Made A Lip Balm To Benefit Incarcerated Women
“I never wear lipstick,” Gloria Steinem told Vogue. “But I can support a lip balm.”
Steinem is a human rights icon, a celebrated writer, and a living hero of history. She also happens to be a paragon of gorgeous style. What’s a girl to do?
In Steinem’s case, the answer is a genius workaround — she partnered with Lipstick Lobby to create a sheer, chicly-packaged balm for which 100% of profits will go to a non-profit organization that helps incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women. “In the Clear,” the vitamin E-based nourishing lip treatment Steinem developed with social-justice beauty company Lipstick Lobby, will retail for $19. All of the net profits from “In The Clear” will go to the UnPrison Project — a non-profit created by Deborah Jiang-Stein which works to provide incarcerated women — particularly mothers — with the skills and empowerment they will need for life after prison and to avoid re-incarceration. The program, which teaches skills like literacy and career-preparedness, has reached over 20,000 women in US prisons. That’s 10% of all women in American prisons.
“Corporations are making money from prisons that charge as much per prisoner as it would take to send a student to Harvard, even though these offenses are minor,” Steinem told Vogue, calling the US prison system a “scandal and shame.”
But there’s no shame in marrying retail therapy and justice work — unlike when other companies offer a tiny fraction of sale profits to a cause, Lipstick Lobby really will give all net profits directly to the UnPrison Project. Like Gloria says: that’s a lip balm we can support.
Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO