Orgasm Blush and the Socio-Political Forces Behind the Language of Naming a Makeup Product

Words: Janvi Sai

‘Orgasm’ could be a Rorschach test. What comes to mind: sexual climax, or the classic warm salmon blush with golden shimmers from NARS Cosmetics?

Beauty product names are fascinating. Beyond cadence and spectacle, they act as archival markers of public consciousness, reflecting the mores of each era. The mid-to-late 2010s, for example, were marked by Obama-era optimism and dusty rose matte liquid lipstick. Hillary Clinton was projected to win the U.S. presidency, Hamilton became a Broadway sensation, and the blogger-founded brand Huda Beauty established itself at the center of the beauty influencer content and choice feminism dominating the cultural zeitgeist. 

Consumerist narratives were shaped by the reformation of the weighty term 'empower' into the buzzword of the hour, as well as by the leveraging of the rhetoric of 'choice' as a catch-all validation. This depoliticised feminist framing reached shopping carts when Huda Beauty produced matte liquid lipstick “Trophy Wife” in 2016, followed by the matte bullet lipstick “Board Meeting” in 2019. 

Nearly a decade later, implicit social messages embedded in stand-alone product titles and dichotomous pairings are amplified through curated collections. While cosmetics brand Live Tinted’s “Blush Crush Liquid Blush” line reads as unassuming and overtly kittenish, even seemingly straightforward branding can be rooted in anything but. The flirty launch with shades aptly called “Infatuated” include the peculiar “Emotionally Unavailable.” For a little rosy bottle, it has a name mystifyingly borrowed from psychological phraseology. 
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The phrase “emotionally unavailable” was originally introduced to describe parent- and caregiver-child emotional attachment. In 1998, child clinical psychologist Zeynep Biringen and colleagues coined the concept in their research paper "Assessing the quality of relationships between parents and children: The Emotional Availability Scales.” In it they defined emotional availability as: “The quality of the emotional connection between a child and adult.” Emotional unavailability was mentioned once briefly in the context of their child development research: “(e.g., Complicated, Detached, or Problematic).” The source from which the blush product name emerged only makes it all the more perplexing. How did a study in family attachment find its way to cosmetics retail? 

Similarly more clinical-sounding than its lovey counterparts, yet sharing their lighthearted tone, is the shade “Love Language.” 

“Together, these names reveal how deeply the way we talk about relationships leans into gender essentialism and gendered absolutes.” 

Love languages were devised by Baptist minister Gary Chapman in his book for marital disputes, The Five Love Languages, released as “Christian literature” by Christian publishing house Moody Publishers in 1992. Since then, however, love languages have been ideologised as a self- and compatibility-identifier, on par with zodiac signs and Myers-Briggs. They’ve made their way to the heavily downloaded dating app Hinge, with users able to add the prompt: “My love language is…” to their profiles. The five love languages from the book are now widely regarded as categories one could sort into like a Harry Potter house, from “acts of service” to “physical touch.” 

They’ve been made conversational to the point of dreaded icebreaker territory, and adopted as far as repurposing. Love languages’ pivot in our daily lexicon illuminates the rebrand of emotionally unavailable, and mirrors how it’s found its way to a crush-christened blush collection. 

In becoming colloquial, “emotionally unavailable” has drifted further from its original definition, often applied loosely in an entirely different context. Sure, there are studied connections between child-parent attachment and theorised adult attachment styles, but much like the Baptist marriage self-help book or the child psychology research from which the term originated, these roots are rarely acknowledged and hence unlikely to be a contributing factor in its consumption. 

By occupying our emotional and romantic shorthand, the diagnostic phrases align with the coquettishly-themed collection, and vice versa, signaling that even the unsuspecting and ostensibly uplifting shade “Magnetic” is part of a larger cultural logic.

Like “Emotionally Unavailable” and “Love Languages,” it’s a phrase which now holds a prescriptive nature and creates a sense of control over love. “Magnetic” is promoted as aspirational and directed primarily toward women, with apps like To Be Magnetic selling the idea of becoming ‘magnetic’ through manifestation will lead to heterosexual coupling. 

Together, these names reveal how deeply the way we talk about relationships leans into gender essentialism and gendered absolutes. 

Kylie Jenner’s celebrity cosmetics line Kylie Cosmetics has kept abreast of popular currents with its latest lipstick shade “girl’s girl.” Like its decapitalisation, the name’s phrasing and tone are intentional, derivative of current social trends, and designed to be unthreatening. 

The beauty industry, being by definition skin-deep, can be superficial in its application of language, rather than plumbing deep meanings or returning to the origins of words. Yet just as we speak about makeup products having undertones, the names of those products carry their own: an appropriation of language by marketing, and the sometimes harmful trends that it encourages. 

Recently, Huda Beauty released the lip gloss “Sugar Baby” and the “EmpoweredEyeshadow Palette.” Elsewhere, in politics, we heard the same language echoed, almost devoid of meaning, as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced: “Floridadoes not ban books; instead, the state has empowered parents to object to obscenematerial in the classroom.”