More Meets Mouth Than Meets Eye

Remember the sweet kick to that Briggs Hall kiss Saturday night? Well, bub, a chemist put it there.

Science Service revealed yesterday that most manufacturers have been adding powdered saccharine--200 times sweeter than sugar--to their current lipstick offerings. Just a little powder--it can be balanced on a pinhead--gives enough of a boost to each stick.

Scattered interviews around the Square last night showed that Radcliffe girls took the news with a "Well, why shouldn't we" attitude, while their Harvard dates bristled with shocked indignation. One Leverett man even described the candy coated paint as "facial falsies."

"When I want to kiss a girl," he said, "I want to kiss a girl, and not Lammot Du Pont."

"It's the Machine Age," said Allen L. Thompson '52. "Now they've got sex coming off the assembly line. First they made girdles. Then they made rouge. Now they make kisses. What'll the machines make next?"

"It's getting to be," he added, "that you can't tell Radcliffe kisses from Hershey kisses."

But neither boys nor girls admitted knowing about the sweet-treatment until told of it by a CRIMSON reporter. Even Miss Alice Chignon of Medford, beautifier at George's Beauty Salon, admitted that neither she nor George knew the stuff was spiked.

According to Science Service, though, the practice has been going on for twenty years. Saccharin lipstick was first tried experimentally in 1925, and now one ton of the chemical is used every year. But the substance is go potent that daily one two-hundredth of a gram goes into each lipstick.

The two greatest dissentient were a Briggs Hall freshman and a Howell-House sophomore. Said the girl "People who want to neck just shouldn't were lipstick--it's messy; it gets him messed up; it gets you messed up. It takes all the romance out of it."