The almost reality of my £1 'lipstick wardrobe', and how a late onset light bulb layering moment led to less lurid looks

I often get asked what my favourite perfume is. Rarely does anyone pose a similar question about lipsticks, though that may just be because I am not known as a beauty blogger.  I have certainly written about my lipstick collection on here - the periodic culls, my separate quests for the perfect pink or red lipstick, my surprise at finding a cheapo dupe in Boots for a particular Burberry and so on, but lipstick is not my 'core business' as it would be for Get Lippie, say.

But like the average woman I seem to have accumulated a lot more lipsticks than I can regularly use. Happily they have more forgiving expiry dates than some categories of toiletries I might mention, not that that tends to stop me, hehe. And despite my periodic purges, the tally gradually creeps up again.

My browny/pinky/nude collection!

Left to right: Dior Pisanelle Pink**, Poundland Choca Mocha (No 4), Burberry Nude Rose, Bourjois Bruns o petits soins**, and Rimmel Not an Illusion. (And yes, my arm was a bit chilly!)

**NB To the best of my knowledge, both the Dior and the Bourjois are discontinued. Which also explains why I can't be bothered to give the Bourjois its circumflex over the 'o'.

As well as having too many lipsticks, I am guilty of having too many in the exact same shade, or at best in infinitesimal variations thereof. Like a homing pigeon or an iron filing to a magnet, every time I scan a make up fixture my eye is drawn to the identical narrow range in which most of my lipsticks lie - in my case, a sort of browny/pinky/nude. That said, I do have another small and burgeoning group of quite similar definite pinks, and a more heterogeneous assortment of reds, most of which I could never bring myself to wear, with the exception of a single lip gloss, now finished and discontinued, which is what prompted the second part of this post.

Revlon Firecracker lip gloss - many happy memories!

My £1 almost lipstick wardrobe 

But back to the first part: the almost reality of my £1 lipstick wardrobe and the notion of a favourite lipstick. My mother had a favourite lipstick...oh yes. Yardley's Pink String, which she wore for as long as I can remember. There is absolutely zero information in Google on that now, which is interesting. Mother used to stockpile that particular shade, and had several unopened tubes at the time of her death (see photo, though the colour is a bit darker and even more vibrant than it appears here).

Yardley Pink String

I made sure (indirectly(!) via the undertakers) that she wore Pink String to her funeral, for she would never go out without applying that finishing touch. In my own case, I think 'favourite lipstick' is perhaps a misnomer, but I certainly have a 'go-to lipstick' that I wear more than any other. I am not even sure if the lipstick in question suits me the best out of all the ones that I own in that category, which includes a high end Burberry that cost over twenty times as much. And I also can't speak to the colour pay off (not least because I have never known exactly what that is, though you see it mentioned in beauty blogs), or the staying power, or the feel of it on your lips. Even though I wear this one most days when I wear lipstick at all, I don't really notice such things. (Which may well be why I am not a beauty blogger!)

Poundland Choca Mocha (No 4) and my enormous fingers

All I can say in this lipstick's favour is that it is the one that more often than not seems to be lying on the dining room table, or at the bottom of my shopping bag, or at the top of my cosmetic bag - in short, it has eminent grabbability as its key attribute. And it tends to go with most things, or I am sure I would notice in the mirror that something was amiss. It's that old adage of 'the musician who played the last gig gets the next gig'. It is top of mind, and always at hand.

And it so happens that in my case, 'the last lipstick that got the gig' cost a mere pound from Poundland - who in a smart marketing move are the only high street retailer to still accept the old £1 coins! - which they are doing till the end of the month. UK readers, hie thee along to Poundland and bag - if not a lipstick - an ingot of Toblerone or a box of Maltesers at the very least. But if you have a yen at all for browny/pinky/nudes, it is No 4, the amusingly named Choca Mocha. A cheapo workhorse, no question. (For anyone interested, Part 1 of my overall review of Poundland's make up range may be found here.)

My late onset light bulb layering moment

And what of the light bulb layering moment alluded to above? Well, since my favourite lip gloss, Revlon Firecracker, got the chop, or self-combusted, or whatever happened to it, I was a bit at sea on the red lipstick front, being chronically wary of the whole category on account of my thin lips. Katie Puckrik and I went on a shopping mission five years ago that culminated in the purchase of a Laura Mercier lip balm in Crimson Tint, but left to my own devices at home, without Katie's chutzpah and moral support, it felt too bold on its own, and had languished in a drawer ever since. Until the end of September that is, when I was down in London for a design awards ceremony, as the 'plus one' of my friend M - the designer I worked for at the trade fair in Brussels - and on a whim, decided to try a slick of Crimson Tint over Choca Mocha, which gave the perfect muted red I craved. (The Laura Mercier is a deeper red than it appears in the photo!)

Laura Mercier Crimson Tint & Poundland Choca Mocha (No 4)

So Crimson Tint has finally come into its own, and please don't tell me it should have been thrown out by now, as it was too expensive to chuck and buy again!

Crimson Tint over Choca Mocha

On a roll, I experimented with another red I am too timorous to wear on its own - Spicy Cinnamon in the Clarins Joli Rouge range - topping it with a layer of Revlon Colorburst Lip Butter in Creme Brulee, another Katie steer.

Revlon Colorburst Creme Brulee & Clarins Joli Rouge Spicy Cinnammon

And as with the previous combo, this had a slightly glossy effect, as well as perfectly toning down the rich red of the Clarins to a more orange-y number that works better with my yellow-leaning complexion. So suddenly, out of the ashes as it were, I have found two options for a non-lurid red. I have scotched the scarlet woman! Not that I wore any of my failed red experiments out of the house, but I have scared the bejesus out of myself in all the mirrors indoors.

Clarins Joli Rouge Spicy Cinnamon - too strong a look on its own

And the more wearable combo...

Revlon Colorburst Creme Brulee layered on top of the Clarins

And the daft thing is that while I have always known about adding a bit of lip gloss to a lipstick - usually in a transparent or fairly sheer colour - I have never ever thought to layer lipsticks (or two lipstick-like entities shall I say, because they are called such a variety of things these days) with a more pronounced colour. We do it with perfumes - actually I don't personally layer scents as a rule, but it is a fairly established 'thing' - and of course artists mix paint colours in their palette, but I just hadn't twigged to the fact that I could do it with lipstick and solve my lurid lip conundrum.

So there you have it. I accept that the £1 wardrobe idea is stretching the point, because I do like a proper pink lipstick as well, even if I could maybe survive without one. But a red option is a must for evenings out and generally making more of a statement. And while I don't feel the Laura Mercier owes me anything after all this time, I think it cost about £14, taking my total wardrobe cost to...ooh er!...scary multiples of the original quid I dropped in Poundland.

Red lips at the awards ceremony!

So may I ask - do you have a favourite lipstick, or one that you keep coming back to because it is an easy wear?

Could you actually live with just one lipstick? And if so, would it be a neutral like mine or something bolder - perhaps red even?!

Painting The Town Red With Katie Puckrik - Part 1: Another Lippie Epiphany

Regular readers - or should I refer to you as irregular readers, as my posting frequency has been decidedly erratic since the house move - may recall that for a long time now I have been on a quest to find Holy Grail lipsticks in a variety of shades. I think I found the perfect nude-browny-pink in Burberry Nude Rose, and the perfect nude-and-not-too-vivid-or-trashy-pink in Dior Pisanelle Pink. However, the perfect red (or even a half-decent red that doesn't make me look like a clown, a hooker or Cruella de Ville) continued to elude me. Back in September, Katie Puckrik, a bit of a make up guru on the quiet, took up the discarded gauntlet / cudgels? on my behalf, and on the occasion of one of our whistlestop meetings at a cafe near Euston, her first act was to upend her handbag and spill a good dozen red lipsticks and lip glosses onto the table. (I wish I had taken a photograph of that!)

As a direct outcome of that testing session (on skin and on Katie in what I can best describe as the lipstick equivalent of a series of lightning costume changes), I went home and bought Revlon Sizzle Lip Gloss and Revlon Lip Butter in Candy Apple. Despite their being on Katie's shortlist of possible contenders for me, I couldn't quite believe in them myself. For I have a real mental block about red lipstick suiting me, partly based on my sallow colouring, but also to do with the relative thinness of my lips compared to Katie's pillowy pout. Somewhere I have taken on board the notion that red lipstick can be unflattering on mature skin. Sharon Stone gives the lie to that supposed "rule" here, but then I am not Sharon Stone, just her age.

KATIE, LOOKING EFFORTLESSLY GLAMOROUS IN A BEANIE

And then at the end of November, I was down in London again, and Katie kindly took me on a make up sampling spree in Selfridges before we headed off for dinner and the evening's (partly unscheduled) entertainment, of which more in Part 2. Sniffing wasn't so much on the agenda, as we had done a bit of that at Les Senteurs where we met up, but we did swing by the Dior display specifically so I could try Grand Bal. I am currently on a jasmine hunt for my Scandal- and Fracas-loving friend Sharon. She is a born-again tuberose lover, who is looking to branch out into other heady white soliflores, of which jasmine seemed as good an example as any. Anyway, I thought Grand Bal very pretty, like a quieter version of By Kilian Love & Tears, maybe. It was of necessity just a fleeting impression, because the sales assistant had no samples to give away. This surprised me, as Dior had always been pretty good bet for doling out those little 4ml pots in the past - hey, between me and Tara, who assiduously scored them on my behalf every time she was up the West End, I must have at least four of New Look alone!

No, the main objective of our dive into Selfridges was to slay this red lippie lemming of mine once and for all, and after a quick scope of every high end beauty counter from Yves St Laurent and Tom Ford to Benefit and Illamasqua, we narrowed the choices to Laura Mercier Crimson Tint and an Armani Sheer Red lipstick, the name of which escapes me. I plumped for the Laura Mercier in the end a) because Katie swore black, blue, white and red that it suited me, b) because it was cheaper than the Armani - I never actually got as far as inquiring, but you just know that it had to be! - and c) because my natural dark pink lip tone kept dragging the Armani red back to pinky-neutral YLBB territory. This was as unhelpful as looking foolishly scarlet, especially at that price, whatever it may have been.

ME WEARING LAURA MERCIER CRIMSON TINT, WHICH LOOKS STRANGELY HOT PINK IN THIS PHOTO

Some weeks have passed, and it is dawning on me that if I can carry off the Laura Mercier, I must have suited the other lipsticks all along, which are in similar vein really. The Revlon Sizzle is perhaps a slightly warmer, more orange-y red, while the Candy Apple is in the same sheer mid-red territory as the Laura Mercier. Crucially not too blue on my olive skin. So the upshot of all of this is that I have been wearing overtly red lipstick in public on a number of occasions since my outing with Katie. Nobody has screamed and recoiled in horror, not a single small child has pointed at me and sniggered, and no one has refused to serve me in a shop. This Christmas I may finally have overcome my irrational hang up about red lippie after all, just in time to accessorise the holly.

ME WEARING REVLON SIZZLE LIP GLOSS, WHICH LOOKS NEAR AS DAMMIT THE SAME STRANGE HOT PINK AS ABOVE, BUT REALLY ISN'T

NB Bonus points to anyone who spots Bloody Frida's pennants in the background!

Coming up in Part 2: The press night of The Card Shark Show, and an entertaining detour en route.


Photo of Dior perfume counter from speirsandmajor.com, other photos my own