Slap Some Lipstick on that Pig

(left: My new lipstick, the Target receipt for it, and my man-globe from Vegas - for scale or something.)

Today’s post is in honor of Zan’s (belated because I suck) Birthday. She turned 35 on Sunday, and she is the last of my nearest and dearest friends to do so before I turn 35. So now it’s just the slow death march to January 27th, when I, once again, must face my own mortality. Ick.

Back to Zan, and back to when we were in college. Zan and I used to swing by Target for a pick-me-up when we were sad. Or happy. Or hung over. Or needing a little something to make us pretty pretty for yet another night out. So yeah, we were there every other day, give or take.

One of our main items of purchase was lipstick. We were convinced that the right lip color would land us the perfect frat boy. Or football player, or wrestler… you get the idea. We amassed quite a collection of lipsticks in our search for the best hunk of burnin’ love, and the best blood red.

Red was hard for us to find, since both our lips tend to make reds “pink out,” and I don’t think we were ever satisfied with just one shade. So we would layer one color over the other until we reached the right red. Needless to say, all this layering required many tubes of lipstick – I think we had about 15 each.

After the red phase was the brown phase, then the purple phase. I’ve since moved out of the dorm, Zan moved to Boston, and now I’ve moved (alone) into my nude phase (nude lip not body, sheesh, get your mind out of the gutter). Therefore, in honor of Zan and the nekkid lip, I bought a new lipstick at Target.

It had to be nude, but with enough color so it didn’t wash me out. It had to be moisturizing, because chapped nude lips look AWFUL. It had to not smell or taste weird. And it had to be under $7.00 – my own personal pain threshold for drugstore brand lipstick.

Thus, I ended up with Maybelline’s Moisture Extreme in Rose Rush for $5.07 (it was on sale). It’s so moisturizing, I don’t need to wear balm underneath. The nude is dark enough for contrast, but not too dark to require precise application. AND it’s SPF 15. Perfect.

TIP: Why do I like nude lipstick? According to makeup artists, it's supposed to make your lips look bigger. And while I have substantial lips to begin with, they are starting to shrink as I get older. While other parts of my body get bigger. Aging sucks.

TIP, TOO: If you run a faint line of white eyeliner around the outside of your lips (not enough to show, just enough to lighten the skin), your lips will also look bigger. I have no idea why, but I read this tip in an interview with Hilary Duff. She recommended highlighting just the cupid’s bow of your lip, but I found outlining the whole mouth works even better. I use New York Color’s white pencil eyeliner; it costs less than $2.