From 'Lolita' To Dakota Johnson's Book Club: A Brief Look At Beauty's Relationship To Literature

Books will not save you from beauty culture.

Did you know there’s no lollipop in Lolita? Everyone thinks of a lollipop when they think of Lolita, but it wasn’t in the book, or the movie, only the poster. It doesn’t exist but it doesn’t matter. The writing was reduced to representation — wet red lips kissing wet red candy — and the representation became reality.

Flattening Lolita into a look didn’t stop at lollipops. Since the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel in 1955, beauty culture has repeatedly taken the story of its unreliable narrator, 38-year-old pedophile Humbert Humbert, at face value in order to give his victim, 12-year-old Dolores Haze (Lolita), a more marketable face.

We first see this in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation. In the book, Humbert claims Lolita seduces him, and Nabokov provides enough context that readers with basic comprehension skills can see this isn’t true. The author “emphasizes that there is nothing conventionally beautiful about [Lolita],” Ira Wells writes in The New Republic. She is “tomboyish, malodorous.” She picks her nose and adjusts her wedgies. She is not a seductress, but a child targeted like prey. Kubrick, in contrast, uses to the tools of physical beauty to strip the story of this essential context and assume Humbert’s perspective. Lolita is “airbrushe[d] into a 1950s pin-up model,” as Wells puts it. Though clearly underage, her painted lips, curled bangs, and shaved legs are framed as evidence of deliberate action — of willful participation. Kubrick “gave the world an image of Lolita … that would endure in the age of Instagram,” Wells continues. “That image, once seen, cannot be unseen. The merely textual Lolita has been lost to us forever.” Meanwhile, the aesthetic Lolita has solidified into an all-but-inescapable beauty standard: girlish youth as both the “dominant archetype for seductive female sexuality” and a declaration of agency.

This Lolita — the independent woman-child, the fiction of a fiction — has informed decades of beauty industry offerings. Revlon’s “Young Blush” promised “innocent color” in 1970. Love’s Baby Soft claimed “innocence is sexier than you think” in 1974 and Maybelline marketed its Kissing Slicks as “not as innocent as they seem” in 1979.

Lines can be drawn between these and more modern iterations of youth-as-beauty-as-sex-appeal-as-empowerment: a makeup line for children called Petite ‘N’ Pretty, an Into The Gloss how-to column for adult women who want to “look like a Disney star in their prime”, Maybelline Baby Lips Lip Balm in Pink Lolita, Jessica Simpson Dessert Treats cosmetics, Marc Jacobs Oh, Lola! perfume, Kat Von D Lolita Red Lipstick, Kat Von D Underage Red Lipstick, Lana-core, doe eyes, doll skin, faux-freckles, all of it — or some of all of it, at least — traced back to a book.

Lolita’s beauty legacy came to mind a few times last week. When I found out they yassified Ella Enchanted. When I learned that Olive & June collaborated with Colleen Hoover on a nail polish set. Mostly, when I read this Emily Gould piece on the Cut: “Why Does Every Famous Woman Have a Book Club Now?”

It begins with the news that Dakota Johnson, like Reese Witherspoon and Emma Roberts and Noname and Kaia Gerber and Dua Lipa and Mindy Kaling before her, is starting a book club. “It’s not beach reads,” Johnson said in an interview. “It’s not silly … People need to deep dive into knowledge about specific things rather than talking about what fucking face serum they’re using and thinking that that’s the most important thing in the world.”

I’m all for deprioritizing face serum — not that Johnson does that; Gould notes the actress proceeds to “say that she loves face serum” — but her positioning here is off. It calls up the classic binary of beauty versus brains, as if brains can (or should) save you from beauty; as if books will somehow alleviate the desire for plant-based, wrinkle-reducing bakuchiol; as if the two traits don’t coexist. They do! (Injectables at a book launch.) They always have. (My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the “sad girl aesthetic”). Historically, commercial beauty is more likely to infiltrate literature than be undone by it.

Many of today’s book-toting celebrities do not encourage fans to divest from beauty culture, I think, so much as encourage fans to apply beauty culture to books — to reduce reading to an aesthetic. See: Kendall Jenner’s “book concierge,” or the “book stylists” curating literary taste for their celebrity clients to curate literary taste for their fans. (Famous, beautiful women already influence the shape of our noses, the texture of our skin, the furrow of our foreheads — must they influence the inside of our minds, too?) Gould wonders if “celebrities mostly use books to add another layer to their personae” since “cultivating bookishness is as good a way as any to transition from one career phase to a more multidimensional one.” There’s also the possibility that celebrity book clubbers mean to turn their book club picks into movies or television shows, like Witherspoon has, eventually entering into public consciousness characters who were imperfect on the page — now with porcelain veneers ($5,000 a tooth) and poreless complexions.

What is the celebrity book club if not the celebrity skincare brand’s successor?

You could say the former is preferable to the latter, and sure, it might be, but literature is not the antidote to anti-aging serums. Books are not above the beauty industry, and they will not make you immune to it. Just ask Oprah. In 1996, she changed publishing with Oprah’s Book Club; nearly 30 years later, she’s pushing Ozempic.

If reading “blows open a new understanding” of all the world’s “corruption and pain,” as an Oprah’s Book Club review once said of Nabokov’s Lolita, then beauty culture makes an aesthetic of it.