Confessions of a Lipstick Junkie

I like lipstick. I like how it feels, but mostly I like the colors. When I go to the store, I have to at least look at the lipsticks. I usually end up buying at least one lipstick. I've always been a sucker for pretty packaging, and am a firm believer in love at first sight.

And in the store, that particular shade of Frosted Rose looked perfect to me. It seemed to look luminous on my skin tone, which is somewhere between dead pallor and geisha mask pale. The purveyors of these lipsticks promise so much! Plumper lips! Smooth lips! Lips that shine! Lips that stop traffic!!(Seriously--Red Light Red. Great name.) Lips that do laundry! Well, not really. You get the idea, though. Lots and lots of promises. Promises don't mean much if the lipstick can't perform.

But I'm not thinking about promises at this moment; all I care about is the pretty in front of me. I fall hard. At that moment, that lipstick is my lips' soul mate and I must have it. Now. Before anyone else gets it. I rush to the checkout clutching my Precious to my chest, pay for it, and rush home.

But in the light of day, I have regrets. What was I thinking? This color is too orange! I look like a two dollar whore in a fifty-cent town! Ack! The color is never as it was when it first caught your eye.

Another problem that I have with the lipsticks I fall for is their stamina. I might put on lipstick at 8am, and by 9am the color is either gone or faded so as to be invisible. Worse, sometimes the color is gone from the center of my lips, but there is a vestige of Honeysuckle Red hovering around the edges of my lips like one of those chalk outlines around a dead body that you see in the movies. Even those so-called 8hr, 16hr, 24hr, long-wearing lipsticks don't stick around. They just can't complete the mission. It's so sad. It would be nice to have at least one lipstick that can go all night like a drunken sailor on shore leave, but for me, it is not to be.

What I search for is to find the perfect shade for me, which in my mind is a little bit darker than my natural color. I would like this particularly perfect shade to be long lasting, so that I can put it on in the morning and it lasts until I take it off in the evening, no matter how many breakfast tacos or glasses of champagne I consume. The color would be so fabulous that passerby would stop their cars and just stare at my lips, and I would feel very lovely indeed. I would call this particular lipstick, if it existed, Holy Grail.