Really Long Review: Bourjois Rouge Edition Velvet Liquid Lipsticks

In this post:

• Finally, a makeup review!
• AN ACTUAL REVIEW of price, packaging, texture, wear… Good Lard.
• A summary so you can skip about 95% of  this post.

Well, it has been a while since I did one of these. My original plan was to wait for a sunny summer day in which I was free, and take a bunch of decent blog photos and swatch photos. Of course, the lighting was never quite right and on top of that I am barely home these days when the lighting IS ok, so I thought that if I didn’t plan and write this and take photos ASAP, this would never go up.

As such, I’ve had to utilise photo-editing apps quite a bit to try to get true-colour images and labelling all in place. My favourite that I’ve used for the photos here is Snapseed, with a mostly self-explanatory interface and clean layout, it’s super easy to use especially just for fine-tuning on my phone, and runs super smoothly. I just need practice…

All right! Onto the actual review.

Released sometime in 2014, it seems (feel free to correct me on that one), Bourjois’ liquid lipstick offering was one of the more popular available I think, as I’ve read many good things about it but of course, now we can choose from NYX and Maybelline and Colourpop and many other brands that are arguably better value.

I’m going to categorise it as ‘comfort matte’ rather than ‘full monty matte’.

It retails for £8.99 from Boots and Superdrug here in the UK, which is a little more expensive than other high-street liquid lipsticks.
However, both retailers do deals on them too, so if you’d like to take the plunge, the 3-for-2 offer is the best for your money if you’d like to buy 3 at once – that brings down the price to £5.99 each. Feelunique.com may also have 1/3 off offers going on (which is when I bought the shade Red-volution).

In the product you get 7.7ml (0.2 fl.oz), so the product costs 85p per ml, FYI. It’s quite hard to find information online of other products to compare this to from the same price bracket. This lipstick is also in quite a different price bracket to other liquid lipsticks anyway (Maybelline and NYX, for example, offer lipsticks at similar prices to each other) which again makes comparison harder.

That being said, you do get more in the tube than with other liquid lipsticks which may explain the price point. NYX’s soft matte lip cream offers 8ml for £5.50.

The packaging is small, a bit chunky, a cuboid. It’s easy enough to pop into a coat pocket last minute or chuck it in your handbag. In my travel makeup pouch, most of my items are long and more slim like pencils so it doesn’t quite fit in.
The lid is the same colour as the shade so it is easy to find the right shade, and the main bottle seems to be a plasticky glass that has decent weight to it and doesn’t feel cheap. As it is used up  and runs out you’ll be able to see how much is left. The name of the product on the bottle doesn’t wear off over time, and in general the packaging is pretty classy and chic.

This has a doe-foot applicator, like pretty much every other liquid lipstick out there, which does reach the bottom of the container although I wonder if it can scrape out the last bits from the corners – due to the texture of the product I don’t think this will be easy to depot. The sides of the bottleneck scrape off excess liquid from the applicator as you pull it out, which is useful as you’ll never have way too much.

The first thing that came to mind as I applied this is ‘creamy’. It goes on super smoothly and also feels quite light on my lips. So, like a light cream mousse texture? It takes a while to dry onto my lips – several minutes. They’ll go from being super creamy to kinda tacky, but still really comfortable and not drying at all. These lipsticks withstand water bottle/mug sipping and salads well – less so with anything remotely greasy. Oils seem to make the lipstick turn into something… unfavourable. I mean lip colour rims and bleeding. Always check up on it after a meal like that.

I’ve found that my favourite way to apply liquid lipsticks is by not dipping more than once into the container to cover all of my lips –

The colours:

Nude-ist is a mauve-pink nude that is deep enough to somehow suit me. It can lean baby pink on my lips, though, especially in photos.

Beau Brun is like a Nude-ist for the warmer of us. It’s browner and redder but just as deep in tone, and appears deep rusty pink on my lips.

Neither of these nude shades work as an actual ‘natural’ shades on me as they’re deep (deeper in real life than in photos – so I’d still recommend swatching them in store), but I like that they’re enough to make it look like I’m making an effort.

Red-volution appears on my lips like a bright, oxygenated blood red – my favourite kind of red. It dries lighter, and I can’t ever photograph its true colour on my phone.

 

To conclude:

• A bit higher price point than other offerings, but 3-for-2s are great.
• Cute packaging
• Colour selection mostly normal, not out-there colours.
• Light mousse texture
• Dries after several minutes
• Great lasting power but weak to oils.
• I should never do lip swatches on my phone again.

For a comfortable matte lip option, these are definitely worth a try.

Thank you for reading!

Until next time,

X

(Updated swatches with the new camera. Hopefully you can see the difference between Nude-ist and Beau Brun better here.)