Coming Soon: Lipstick Swatchfest
Why are these lovelies in baggies, you might wonder. For organization purposes only. Rather than write one epic article, I'll be dividing lipsticks (both drugstore and department store brands) into the following tonal groups:
- Purples, plums, violets, grapes (posted here)
- Reds (posted here)
- Bright pinks
- Light pinks, soft pinks, and pinkish nudes (here)
- Cool corals (oxymoron alert!) here
- Roses, including brown-based (tea) roses
With the exception of a new Edward Bess color, nothing is new here. I have little interest in purchasing collections; other bloggers do an outstanding job at tempting you with those beauties. Instead, the goal of this lipstick series is to place similar colors in context, hopefully facilitating your research and helping you make more informed purchases. This series should largely appeal to a minority, diminishing group: those who have pure (blue based) cool undertones.
Outside foundation, lipstick is the most challenging purchase to get right without trying it on first. Surely I am not the only one who's made a department store purchase based on the sales associate's swatch on her skin (or mine), only to get home and wonder why the color didn't work. I bet some of us can also remember occasions when online swatches failed us--not because of the blogger, who performs a time-consuming, highly-useful service when posting comparisons--but because of our interpretation of a color swatched on another person's skin.
It helps if I can identify a color's properties (hue, chroma, value, finish) before I consider applying it to my face, but how do I get this information? I have found that looking at lipstick in the tube is completely unreliable. As for skin swatching, my strawberry-milk skin can immediately warm up what appears to be a cool pink, entirely because my eye did not see the warmth lurking in the pigment, but my skin sure noticed.
To the rescue comes white paper, which shows a lip color at its most true. This is how I swatch now, and I am finding it especially useful to refer back to those paper swatches, something I can't do after more than a few minutes of makeup on my skin (it's not like I can walk around that way all day). I might occasionally include color on the back of my hand or on my lips, but not often, not anymore. I do not want my skin tone adulterating a color's undertones--we all know how that can "turn" a color.
If your coloring is cool to cool-neutral, soft, and light-medium in value, you just might see something here you like over the next week. You Summers who read this blog, I'll be including the Sci\ART-based 12 Tone Summer fans for comparison.
Also, because my skin is purely cool toned, I might occasionally compare the colors I own to the 12 Tone (Sci\Art) True Winter Fan. I have that fan to put my own palette in context and so I don't step too far over the line into a chroma that's too high for me.
If your skin has warm undertones, then you are very fortunate because the majority of the blogging world and makeup industry's offerings are for you. There are, simply, more of you!
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