This year’s best lip products barely resemble lipstick. Stains wipe away to leave colour behind, liners peel off, crayons blur, and glosses carry as much pigment as a bullet.
Set it and forget it
Lip stains used to mean watery tints that settled patchily and left lips parched by lunchtime. The current generation is far more engineered, and far more interested in staying power than subtlety.
Wonderskin’s Limited Edition All-Day Lip Stain in Headliner is a good example. The shade is inspired by Virgin’s signature red, softened with a little pink so it works across skin tones. It goes on as a blue masque. After a minute you wipe that away to reveal colour that Wonderskin says lasts up to 10 hours without transferring or smudging. It takes the classic statement red and removes the part everyone hated: checking it in every reflective surface you pass.
Wonderskin Limited Edition All-Day Lip Stain in Headliner
Shop at WonderskinThe more theatrical version of the trend involves peeling. Sacheu’s Peel Off Lip Liner STAY-N is traced along the lip line and left until it dries into a film. Then you peel it away to leave a crisp, smudge-proof edge. It takes patience, since Sacheu suggests leaving it on for up to 20 minutes.
Nobody used to notice your lip liner, and that was rather the point. It kept lipstick from feathering and was never meant to be seen. Overlining changed the brief. Sacheu’s DoubleDown Lip Definer is a good example of where that has led: one end is a darker shade for tracing the edge and the other a wider, lighter one for filling in, so it does the work of two pencils.
Bob Beauté’s The Lipliner, takes the more traditional route. It’s a sharpenable pencil with a creamy texture that glides on without the scratchy drag of a cheap liner. You get about 30 seconds to soften the line before it sets, and after that it stays put.
Not everyone wants a sharp edge. The blurred lip skips it, pressing colour into the centre and diffusing it outwards so it looks lived-in from the first swipe. ILIA’s Lip Sketch Hydrating Crayon, a soft-matte cross between lipstick and liner, is easier to smudge than a polished bullet, and that’s half the appeal.
Gloss, layered
Gloss has changed as well. The newest formulas carry colour and sit somewhere between gloss, balm and lipstick, and they have little in common with the sticky, glassy lips of the early 2000s. Increasingly, gloss goes on over something else.
SHEGLAM’s Line To Shine Peel-Off Lip Stain & Gloss Duo puts both layers into one dual-ended tube, with a peel-off stain at one end and a tinted gloss at the other. You get longevity underneath and shine on top.
Frost and fire
It’s doing fine, and some of it is coming back. MAC has revived its Frost Lipstick, the high-pearl formula from the early 2000s, and Spanish Fly is one of the returning shades. It’s a reddish-brown with a duochrome shimmer that shifts as it catches the light, a degree of reflection no stain can give you.
Victoria Beckham Beauty has gone the other way with Rouge Victoria, a new edit of six demi-matte reds. Coquelicot, a warm poppy, is the one to start with. You can wear it fully saturated or blot it down for a softer edge. Twisting up a bullet is still a small ritual, and the colour goes on more directly than any peel-off formula allows.
Image: Victoria Beckham Beauty
