If you've ever been in love, you know that the thoughts that go through your head during the early stages of infatuation aren't necessarily the thoughts of a sane person. "This song reminds me of him." "I wonder what he's doing." "These bushes are scratchy, but it's worth it to watch his front door for a while."
It's OK, because love is supposed to be obsessive and weird at first. But there's a fine line between "excessively infatuated" and "John Hinckley Jr.-esque." Do you know what that fine line is made of? Bronze. Which is why making a bronze statue of your own lips as a gift for another human was never a good idea. In 1972, a company called South Mountain Passage disagreed, so they advertised a service for young women in love. For only $21.95 (that's about $120 in 2013), you could order a foolproof Take-My-Lips Kit, which was probably less horrifying than it sounded. The ad doesn't tell us how the kit worked, but I'm guessing it wasn't much more that a small vat of paste you were supposed to apply to your lips.
After the plaster dried, the girl was instructed to send the cast of her lips to South Mountain Passage in Garrison, New York, where they'd make a bronze statue of her mouth right away and definitely not use it for masturbatory purposes. For $2 extra, the company would mount the lips on a walnut base before sending them back to her. And when I say "mount the lips on a walnut base," I mean they'd complete that task in two different ways before the girl got her lips back.
From there, the girl would presumably give her lips to the object of her affection, which was where the whole concept took a turn for the crazy. It doesn't matter what year it is; giving the gift of a bronzed version of your own body parts is the worst kind of message. You can't pull it off unless you're a pharaoh, and I'm guessing only three pharaohs responded to this ad, tops. If the whole thing wasn't creepy enough, South Mountain Passage had a whole mess of bad speculations as to what the guy would do with the metal lips -- ideas like wearing them on a chain, or on a belt buckle, or as a bicep band. As if anyone on the receiving end of a mounted mouth replica wouldn't shut down that relationship faster than a guy regrets wearing a bicep band.