The most kissed lips in the world?

摘要

Are the lips of the girl in the plaster cast image the most kissed in the world? (see Fig. 1). This 'death mask' image of a female as young as 15 years has inspired writers, poets and artists such as Rilke, Nabokov, Camus and Man Ray.1 She is most widely known as Tinconnue de la Seine' (the unknown female of the Seine). The cast is purportedly the death mask of a young woman pulled from the Seine in 1900 whose facial expression, like the Mona Lisa or the smiling Angel of Reims, haunted the mortuary worker. Her identity remains unknown, despite the myriad of stories about her to be found on the Internet. Most recently, her mask is the inspiration for the novel L 'Inconnue de la Seine by Didier Blonde, June 2012, Editions Gallimard. And why are her lips so often kissed? Her face was the inspiration for the 1960 model that became Resusci Anne. The Laerdal company was already producing dolls, including one called Anne, and Asmund S. Laerdal used the face of the supposedly drowned young woman to help create a life-like manikin.2 She was to enable excellent training in the new form of resuscitation, mouth-to-mouth expired air resuscitation and chest compression (Fig. 2).