Lipstain Love

I think I’m seriously addicted to lipstains. For real.

It all started before Halloween one year. I decided to do a few practice runs on my nun makeup before the big costume party and everything looked great except for my lips. If I used lipgloss, my mouth felt gooey and messy. Lipstick looked more polished, but I felt like I had to reapply it every 5 minutes because it wore off so quickly. It was then that I discovered the lipstain: a cool, marker-like makeup product that gave you a gorgeous pout for up to 12 hours.

The first lipstain I loved was mark.’s Kissink Lip Tintmarker in Red Siren ($7.00). The lipstain’s packaging literally looked like a mini magic marker, which freaked me out at first. Did I buy a cosmetic product or did the company accidentally send me some of their office supplies?

Nevertheless, I tried it out and was pleasantly surprised with the end result. I had a gorgeous, berry-red lip that lasted about eight hours before it began to fade. I could even layer lipstick on top of it and it lasted longer than five minutes!

To be honest, though, mark.’s lipstain looks really strange when it’s first applied. In fact, it had a really ugly brown color at first that freaked me out (once again). Oh no! Did I just dye my lips a weird coffee color?! But the color faded into a beautiful red within one minute and my wave of fear washed away.

Recently, I discovered Maybelline’s Color Sensational Lipstain in In The Buff (on sale for $4.19 at Ulta right now). Definitely a new favorite product! Like mark.’s stain, Maybelline’s product also comes in a magic marker packaging, except it’s slightly larger (more product? Yay!). I was happily surprised to find that it had a delicious berry scent that I had never noticed in another makeup product before. While the stain only lasted half as long as mark.’s lipstain, it still looked gorgeous on and wasn’t awkward to reapply in public (mark.’s could look a little strange because of the dark brown color).

Overall, I would strongly recommend a lipstain to anyone that is sick of lipglosses and lipsticks. Be sure to exfoliate lips before applying it, though, because a stain can look very drying.

Have you used a stain before? What were your experiences with it? If you haven’t, would you ever try one?