Liz Earle Sheer Pink Lip Shimmer Review

I got this product at the Liz Earle shop in the Victoria Quarter in leeds. The shop is cool, bright and airy and smells refreshing and uplifting.

While in the shop I sampled the fragrance I had been eyeing and after a long and hot shopping trip I can still smell it strongly on my wrists. I'll definitely be looking into that zesty scent when funds allow!

Anyway, onto the product we are here to review. Served in a tiny pale pink screw top pot emblazoned with the Liz Earle "science flower" as I call it, the name of the product is on the bottom of the pot and is not visible when looking at it normally. A little unusual but by the colour and shape it's fairly obvious what we will find inside.

Unscrewing the lid the product inside is slightly darker, more mauve than the pot itself but carries the same shimmer. Swatched on my (very pale) hand there is a subtle pinky shimmer but no obvious deposit of colour. After the initial swatch I guessed that the product wouldn't show up as colour on my lips, which is fine, but after applying it to my lips I was surprised to see that they do indeed look "pinker". Not having a lot of natural pigment to my lips I didn't expect this at all from such a sheer product. Perhaps the ingredients themselves bring out the colour. Hmm.

While we are on the subject of the ingredients, the product has a really interesting herbal smell, it is one I find pleasant but I admit I was surprised at how "savoury" the scent is compared to lip products I am used to. Upon arriving home I called up the Liz Earle website to check the ingredients as I could swear that the lip shimmer smells of basil! After checking though there is no basil in this product so I'm not entirely sure which of the ingredients I am picking up. The earthy herbal smell is a comforting one though and it smells like you are putting something good for your lips on rather than a cosmetic product, which I suppose is true!

Overall I'm already enjoying using this product. I hate how lipsticks leave a mark around the edge of your lips when you don't have time to maintain them, but having so little natural pigment I'm always looking for a maintenance free way to look a little more awake during the day or at work. This product will almost certainly enter my regular rotation right alongside my beloved lanolips.

Pictures: Myself looking a little worse for wear after being rained on and tired after running around leeds all day!

Origins liquid lipcolour review

Place holder post for review.

Colour "Really Rosy" applied over my bare lips. Moisturising, non sticky, fresh and minty. Quit pigmented, my natural pigment is very low. No other makeup on in this picture. Sorry about that!

Oracles of beauty - the little pink powder

Well done if you've already guessed what I'm about to discuss, those little tubes and pots of brightly coloured pink, ripe with the promise of revealing hidden secrets. Like the real oracles of ancient greece however I'm inclined to think of their predictions as deliberatley vague to provide the illusion of mystery.

All right all right I'll get to the point. This outbreak of colour change "shifts to the most perfect pink for YOU" products that simply refuses to go back to the mists of the 80's from which it crawled. I hate the way they use science, not complex science mind you, science we've all done in our fabulous free education, to attempt to baffle us into believing many ridiculous things, as I shall demonstrate below...

The products all claim to use "the pH in your skin" to adjust their colour. We will start by dissecting just this one claim. Let's assume that this is correct and the products do react to pH, by no means an impressive feat, red cabbage and Phenolphthalein can perform this circus trick and with their clear to pink spectrum it wouldn't surprise me if the chemical in these products was of similar origin or makeup.

Let's have a closer look then, pH is a measure of acid/alkaline. 7 in the middle is neutral. Stomach acid being the strongest acid at 1 and bleach the strongest alkali at 13. The general idea - that we got from school anyway - was that alkalis (at the levels most people would come into contact with) were far more dangerous than acids. Our skin is slightly acidic at pH 5.5. Looking at the way Phenolphthalein works i'd wager whatever chemical they use is very sensitive to slight variations around pH 5-6 with the pink darkening towards the more alkali end.

Indicators are a fairly basic, but visually impressive science and i'm not averse to their use as an exciting and entertaining product, I love science, I love pink, these are normally something i'd be all over. But no, what I don't like about these products is the way they heavily imply that whatever pink it turns is your OMGSUPERSECRETMOSTPERFECTESTJUSTFORYOUSPECIALSNOWFLAKE.

The product changes colour, it reacts to the pH in your skin, pH has nothing to do with tone or what suits you, the lipstick/gloss/blush CHANGES COLOUR - that is awesome in and of itself, I don't need to be told that it knows what suits me better than my own eyes do, I'm not going to buy it for fashion advice, If I buy it at all it's because it uses science and changes colour.