lips - The Seventh Sphinx

Remember how I don’t need any more lip balm?

Well…I got some more lip balm.

1. Jurlique Rose Love Balm – brilliant product from the Australian biodynamic* brand Jurlique. This is essentially olive oil fixed with beeswax, so it melts on contact, like putting coconut oil on your lips (which is also nice)…or olive oil. I love rose. This is a multi-purpose balm (though I suppose you could consider most lip balms a multi-purpose balm – it’s all marketing), but on the lips it feels especially like a nourishing treatment.

2. Dr. Hauschka Lip Balm – officially my favorite lip balm right now, especially at night, and prominently placed on my dressing table. And from another biodynamic brand. This has a peculiar texture I haven’t quite come across before. It’s another blend of oils (a lot of them) mixed with various herbal extracts and fixed with beeswax, but the oil content is high, and the texture is incredibly soft and yielding. It is blended in such a way that the effect is not oily (as with the Jurlique balm), but creamy. This has to be in a pot because the texture could never survive in stick form. Smells to me vaguely and pleasantly herbal/medicinal. Melts into the lips beautifully and not in an oily way, it maintains presence of friction, isn’t slick…obviously I am an obsessive case and whether or not I am willing to spend $17 on a lip balm maybe doesn’t help you much, but I will say that I have spent more on products I liked much less. This is the kind of product I plan to begin giving indiscriminately as a gift.

3. Nuxe Rêve de Miel Lip Moisturizing Stick – a great blend of shea butter, honey, and luxurious (argan, macadamia) oils in convenient stick form. I happen to prefer the softer formulations that tend to come in pots but sticks are convenient to carry around, and this is a beautiful one. Not as bizarre as the ultra-nourishing version, texture-wise. This is more a luxe version of your standard non-wax based (actually nourishing, not just protective) balm stick.

Yes, I think about lip balm a lot.

*Worth investigating the basics of biodynamics, I think. There is a fair amount of what I consider empty ceremony built into the structure of biodynamics but what the process is able to achieve, and the extent to which it is in harmony with the environment, can’t be refuted.

I know I am not alone in often resorting to subpar formulas for the sake of a tremendous color. That is what makeup really comes down to, for me, a straight issue of color. Do I love it? Do I want it? Is it worth it?

Color has powerful effects on us! Or can have. There are studies. I have immediate, often visceral responses to colors, for good or ill.

I’m debating this eyeshadow palette right now, the Kat Von D ladybird palette, just for the sepia color on the end. I hardly even wear eyeshadow! I have no money to waste! But this color…it is exactly, exactly the color I have been looking for. I just want to gaze at it and marvel at it. And maybe I would wear it! If I had that perfect color…(is how it goes in the brain).

You see, on the far right, what I mean? That rusty, burnt sienna color? I have seriously been looking for a sepia eyeshadow like this for years! The rest of the palette is nice, too, conveniently.

Helllooooo…

I have been thinking about makeup this way constantly lately, as a tool for controlling color–hills and valleys of color, planes and angles of color–, and the paradigm works every time. A nice simplicity to it.

Uhh. Where was I? Oh, yes.

Ideally, though, you don’t have to compromise with the formula, and in NARS Heatwave (called ‘semi-matte’ and accordingly matte but not in that unfriendly way) we see a happy confluence of form and function. A brilliant, almost neon red*(which sometimes plays a heavily saturated neon coral) that performs exactly how you would hope. At least, exactly how I hoped. If I’d had it at the time, I would have included Heatwave with my earlier red-orange/orange-red picks.

I was in no way disappointed, and perhaps you begin to gather how particular I am.

*Wearing it here.

Category: lips

on the lips: …more lip balm

on the lips: NARS Heatwave lipstick