A lipstick is worth a hundred words
by Jessica M

The writer Oscar Wilde is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and his grave is marked by an imposing Egyptian Revival monument. For some reason, visitors to the cemetery have created a tradition of kissing the monument and leaving a lipstick mark. A sign strictly forbids this “defacing” of the stone, but when you stand at the grave and you see all the lipstick kisses in a rainbow of colors, it’s hard not to pay your own respects to Oscar. As Wilde himself wrote, “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

Photograph of Wilde’s tomb by Robert Loerzel (2000) via Flickr.