Let’s talk about make-up! Quick. Empty out your purse. Run to your bathroom/closet/desk drawers. Your jacket pocket. Your nightstand.
How many lip products do you own?
I did this the other day to take a quick inventory of all of the lip products I owned and managed to find 15 different types of lip gloss/lipstick/lip balm and “enhancing” products.
Next question: how many of these do you actually use?
I only use slightly over half of these products with any sort of regularity. I’m not even sure I’ve ever used that Sally Hanson Lip Inflation Extreme. (It came in a gift pack with a bottle of nail polish, which I do use.)
Conventional wisdom (your mother, various magazines, the internet) says you’re supposed to throw away old lip products after 6 months or whenever you get sick. I’ve pretty much never done this. Of these 15 products I managed to find (I’m sure I have more lurking somewhere), only 6 are actually younger than 6 months. (They are all in the “I use regularly” category, so basically what I’ve learned is I do at least stop using products after 6 months, I just don’t throw them away.) The two products I do use regularly but are older than 6 months are the Clinique Almost Lipstick in Black Honey which I cannot bring myself to replace because it’s expensive and the mysterious lipstick that came from one of those weird giant make-up gift packs they sell in drug stores around Christmas over a year ago that I can’t replace because I don’t know what brand or color it is, but it’s the perfect red lipstick for me.
The products I use regularly:
- Kiehl’s Lip Balm #1
- Sugar Rose Tinted Lip Treatment*
- Tarina Tarantino Electric Butterfly lip gloss
- Tokidoki lip gloss
- dual-sided lip gloss (bought it at Payless)
- Lovely Me:Ex lip gloss (bought it at The Face Shop)
- Clinique Almost Lipstick in Black Honey
- mystery perfect red lipstick from God knows where
*This was part of my 2012 Sephora Beauty Insiders “birthday gift.” If you’re not a Sephora Beauty Insider, you should definitely sign up because you can earn points and you get a free present on your birthday, no purchase necessary. However, you will then fall in love with a lip balm that retails for $22.50 so perhaps you shouldn’t sign up to become a Sephora Beauty Insider.
