Moaveni describes her peers gradually being lulled into sybaritic comas by indulging in extraneous whims, like deciding "to wear or not to wear lipstick" while the old guard, those fierce dissenters like her own mother, become more and more estranged from a new emerging Iran, by refusing to budge from their what she calls "old state of mind--a powerful assurance in the bottomless awfulness of being in Iran."

By leaving a wine bottle inadvertently in a car the author causes a friend to receive thirty lashes and realizes that she " would never write [her] dream headline: Vile Clerical Regime Falls." The book is an attempt to come to terms with Iran and being Iranian without any hope of significant change.

Lipstick Jihad provides the reader with necessary insight to the turmoils of being both modern and being an Iranian woman at the same time, two conflicting situations. What with a new Iraq finding its feet, and Iran on the new world political agenda, books like Moaveni's can provide us blind outsiders with valuable insight.

Meanwhile, wanting to be independent of unreliable foreign sources in meeting its own day-to-day energy needs, the Iranian parliament decided to move ahead with enriching Iran’s uranium supplies.

The official Iranian news agency (IRNA) reported that the Parliament will oblige Iran's Atomic Energy Organization (IAEO) to produce part of the nuclear fuel needed for the country's reactors. According to IAEO's deputy head for international affairs and planning, Mohammad Saeedi, parliament will present a bill to "task Iran's Atomic Energy Organization with meeting part of the fuel for the country's atomic plants."

Internal news reports concerns over the militarisation of politics with the possibility that an individual connected with the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) could be elected as Iran's next president causing anxiety in Iranian political circles.

Meanwhile poor and disillusioned, suspended between the wielding gun and chic lipstick, Iranians are opting for the needle.

The government says 1.2 million drug addicts are in Iran and a further 800,000 regular users, but local drug-treatment NGOs say true figures are much higher. After the revolution, drug use became a criminal offence and addicts were given the lash or executed. But as the youth numbers boomed, unemployment rose and availability increased, drug use soared. Abuse now stretches right across the classes.

"We live next to one of the world’s biggest drug producers and are on the transit route to Europe, so there is a great increase in drug use," said Parviz Maliki, head of the Aftab Society, which runs a treatment clinic in central Tehran. "After the fall of the Taleban, the [Afghan] government wasn’t able to stop the trade so production is getting higher and higher and more drugs are flowing into Iran, which has caused a big rise in addiction."

Events in Afghanistan have a direct and immediate impact in Iran. When the Taleban banned poppy farming in 2000, the price of opium shot up and many people turned instead to the cheaper and more addictive heroin. Now, with a bumper Afghan poppy harvest, both drugs are flooding the market at reduced prices.

While vast amounts of Western money has been spent stemming Afghanistan’s massive heroin export trade, Afghanistan itself is facing a catastrophic scenario of booming domestic addiction largely unaided. Iran however, faces either inner crumbling or an equally destructive war.