During my lipstick ban last year, Mom handed me a lipstick, saying she caved into peer pressure and bought it after admiring a work colleague who always pulled off these shades. She changed her mind soon after, having barely used it, saying it wasn’t her type of colour.
This Lancôme Rouge in Love range has been split, interestingly, into 3 ‘moods’: M for daytime, B for cocktail time, and N for nighttime.
Price: £22-24~
Availability: Lookfantastic, Debenhams, anywhere Lancome is available.
Cruelty-Free? Lancôme don’t test their products on animals, but do sell in China where third-party animal testing is required by law.
It has a chunky round aluminium tube, with a weighty lid – heavier than the lipstick itself – and a click fastening. It looks and feels fancy, with red detailing on the side of the lid, and the embossed Lancôme flower on the bullet (although mine is a bit messy looking). It’ll stay together even if it’s knocked around a bit in my makeup bag.
On my lipstick stand, the base is a little too big to fit when placed right way up, so I have to store it upside down. However, the silver makes it fairly unique and easy to find in my collection anyway, making it easy for me to grab n go in a rush.
The colour I have is 163M, Dans Ses Bras (which translates to ‘in his arms’ from French on google translate). The shade itself looks red in the bullet but translates to a very warm and rosy/ not-too-bright pink. It’s actually gorgeous. It’s buttery smooth and silky, and the pigment swatches even and melts onto the hand swatch or lips. It’s also plenty pigmented for a product in this balm category. I’m slightly worried it might melt, though, as it’s so soft. I also hugely appreciate how forgiving it is on dry lips – provided they’ve been at least exfoliated a little to get rid of prominent dead skin flaps, it’ll glide over dryness as if it’s not there.
It claims 6 hour wear on the Lancome website. I expect it to be less after eating, but otherwise with just water and easier snacks it outperforms that. 6 hour wear is nothing on the 24 hour claims we see so often at the moment but it’s far more realistic and I like that. After the 6 hour mark, when it has worn down a lot, it bleeds a bit at the edges of my lips – this can be fixed maybe with a liner or blending a tinted, less pigmented balm into the outer edge of the lips with a brush.
It’ll stain dryer areas of the lips but overall comes off very well with just dry tissue. Overall, between the shade and forgiving formula I can imagine myself reaching for this all year, depending on when I move into another phase.
Until next nime,
X
Twenty Swans 