Songfacts®:

• "Lipgloss" was the lead single off Pulp's 1994 album His 'n' Hers, which perhaps became more famous for its other singles - "Babies" (released prior to the album and again on The Sisters EP) and "Do You Remember The First Time?" - which signaled the start of the band's breakthrough into mainstream success in the mid-1990s.
• The song uses the metaphor of a girl loosing her "lipgloss" to signify a loss of libido or sex appeal. Jarvis Cocker goes into slightly more detail when discussing the His 'n' Hers album as a whole in a 1995 interview with Vox magazine: "Well, it was definitely better than anything else we'd done. The theme was mostly about couples and how if you get into a relationship you subjugate parts of your personality. If that relationship breaks up you're suddenly an incomplete person. "Lipgloss" was specifically about social skills going rusty. That and the fear of large shopping malls like Meadowhall in Sheffield."