Tuesday 15 November 2011

Erase and Rewind.

For months and then years I had hankered after the little pot of loveliness that is MAC Lip Erase.
 With no access to a nearby MAC Pro store and the organization skills of a four year old I had never gotten my act together quick enough to nab one from any of the limited edition collections MAC had thrown our way, but my luck was to change as I wandered through House of Fraser on what happened to be the last Thursday of the month... IE. Pay day!

 With the aid of a helpful MAC girl I picked up a few vital bits and pieces and had noticed out of the corner of my eye the lip erase sitting quietly, patiently, as part of the Fall Colour 2011 collection just waiting for my inner shopping demon to cry out  "Yes! There is something else I'd like actually, I'll have a lip erase please"

 I'm still yet to decide if I love or loathe when the SA smiles sweetly and asks "Is there anything else you would like today...?" Cue panicked thoughts of what else you could possibly add to your waiting pile of goods under such mounting pressure. Then you remember the lip erase. It seems rational, you've been after one for a while now. You'll practically be saving money on the foundation or concealer you wont be using to drain your lips of their natural colour anymore, it's the right thing to do.

 And so that is how I finally ended up in the possession of my un-swatched Lip Erase!
 First impressions were not so great. I had always assumed Lip Erase would have the balmy, glossy texture of the MAC tinted lip conditioners and so I smeared it on right away on my train home. Straight onto my poor dry lips. It looked awful. Things marginally improved when a slick of Juicy Tubes was added to the mix but again it definitely wasn't what I had imagined in all the months I had spent yearning for the product I thought would provide the perfect nude lip.

 I had all but given up on lip Erase and had relegated it to the murky depths of my makeup box. At one point I even attempted to fashion it into somesort of concealer. Epic, epic fail on my part and I should have known better, but alas, after my usual trick of googling "[enter product here] swatch" it seems I had gotten it all wrong, what I had hoped would be a nude conditioning balm turns out to be a mere step in the recipe for the perfect bold lip. In hindsight this makes a lot more sense... erasing the natural lip colour to provider a truer pigment representation for a bold lipstick, stain or gloss. So I put it to the test under a favourite coral of mine - now MAC's cream colour base in Virgin Isle, which is now sadly discontinued, usually translates to a half-hearted coral effort on my bare pigmented lips but a swipe of lip erase onto (well prepped) lips before a quick smudge of Virgin Isle does the trick perfectly.

 So from now on, any swatched/applied lip products will be done so with a base layer of Lip erase for continuity, and at the end of the day I'm still pretty happy with lip erase, I just wish it was what I thought it was... until then I melted one of my many lone pots of Vaseline and mixed in a smidgeon of lip erase to quench my nude-gloss hybrid thirst.

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