Etude House Color in Liquid Lips Review and Swatches!

Etude House's Color in Liquid Lips has launched here, and according to their website it's a as a "melted liquid lipstick with the intense color and high shine to make provocative yet lovely sheer lips", with "cushiony water-sliding texture" to keep lips "supple and hydrated".

In that sense, it's a product that's sort of a hybrid between a lipstick and a lipgloss - a liquid lipstick, if you will. Based on appearances, it's fairly similar to the Dior Addict Fluid Sticks and Maybelline's Color Elixirs, and even looks like a lipstick, although it's actually a lipgloss! Of course, this is Etude House, so the Color in Liquid Lips comes packaged with a fanciful, princess-y feel, with cute, girly lip motifs.

Etude House Color in Liquid Lips: A cute, girly take on all the liquid lipstick products going on

There are 20 shades of Color in Liquid Lips in all, but I have 5 of them here, ranging from orange-based shades, to pink-based shades, and to reds. So far, they seem to be getting good reviews from other bloggers, so I thought I should get around to reviewing these too!


Etude House Color in Liquid Lips: A melted lipstick with intense colour and shine
Of course, I wouldn't be a good blogger if I didn't have swatches and reviews for you, right? But, because I'm something of an ingredients geek, let's start by dissecting the ingredients in this product! I promise it's more interesting than it sounds!

Vecua Honey Honey Luster Lipgloss Swatches

Vecua Honey is a Japanese brand that is sort of like a cuter, girlier, Asian version of Burt's Bees. Both brands have makeup, skincare, and body care products, both brands have a natural angle, and both brands feature bees and their byproducts prominently in their advertising. For instance, their latest line of lipglosses, the Honey Luster Lip Gloss, is marketed as being part honey serum, part lipgloss.

As it so happens, I've just reviewed a product that also featured another bee by-product, propolis, as its key ingredient. I swear it's coincidence. I didn't plan it, but after the science and research-heavy skincare post, I felt like a swatch post was next, just to give me a breather. It just so happened that the swatches were of another honey product, so that part was coincidental.

Vecua Honey Honey Luster Lipgloss in Honey

Anyway, the lipglosses are quite cool-looking when you first get them - they are dual-phase, so there is a yellow-gold layer of honey serum on the top half, and the bottom half is the lipgloss colour. Of course, as you use the lipgloss, the two phases get mixed together, until in the end you get just one homogenous phase throughout. The price of the lipgloss also isn't cheap - in Westgate's Tokyu Hands shop, the pricetag was SGD$51.40 for a lipgloss, which gave me sticker shock. On the Vecua Honey website, however, it lists the price as SGD$48.

Vecua Honey Honey Luster Lipgloss in Honey, Honey Dew Pon Pon Cheek and Solid Perfume

Vecua Honey also has a range of other makeup products - above is a small blush and a solid perfume, in addition to the Honey Luster Lipgloss (the shade I have is Honey). And like Burts Bees, the products are also often advertised to have some botanical or bee-product ingredients inside. Anyway, on to the swatches!

Pantone Colour of the Year 2015 Marsala: Shopping My Makeup Stash

Marsala is Pantone's Colour of the Year 2015, and unlike some previous years' Colour of the Years, I'm actually pretty excited for this, because as a makeup junkie, I feel like Marsala is pretty versatile on lips and cheeks. (I wouldn't be keen to wear it on my eyes, though.) Naturally, you can expect lots of commercialization with the Colour of the Year - like the Sephora X Pantone collections, and to be honest, the whole "Colour of the Year" thing always feels a bit enforced/commercialized to me - for one, the colour of the year is a decision that is made a year in advance by a small number of people in the industry, as Wiki helpfully points out: "Twice a year the company hosts...a secret meeting of representatives from various nations' color standards groups. After two days of presentations and debate, they choose a color for the following year...the color for summer 2013 was chosen in London in the spring of 2012." So yes, for some reason, people we don't know choose a colour for us a year in advance, and deem it the "Colour of the Year". It sounds arbitrary and a tad bizarre to me, but there it is.

My Marsala-ish coloured makeup stash!

At least, this year's Colour of the Year looks pretty good to me. Unliek 2013's Emerald, which I found a tad unwearable makeup-wise (emerald eyes just aren't my thing, let alone lips or cheeks, although I did rock an Emerald eye look in 2013!), and 2014's Radiant Orchid, which I liked personally but can imagine how some people with warmer skintones might find unwearable, Marsala looks pretty universally flattering, and actually wearable when it comes to makeup.

The closest things I have to Pantone's 2015 Colour of the Year

I'm definitely eyeing some of the items in the Sephora X Pantone collection this year, but I thought, as an excercise in frugality (don't look at me like you're not convinced - I said frugality, not futility!), I should attempt to dig through my makeup stash to see what Marsala-coloured products I already have in my stash, to see whether I am already all up to my eyes in Marsala products, or whether I still have room for a few more!

Pantone Colour of the Year Radiant Orchid: Look at the Radiant Orchid-ish Stuff I Already Have!

Pantone has officially announced Radiant Orchid as the Colour of the Year 2014, and this time, I'm actually pretty excited for it because, as I've been saying in my previous blogposts, purple is my favourite colours. If you've been reading for a while, you'll also know that I think that this whole Colour of the Year thing is just another means of making them companies more $$$ through commercialization of a single colour shade, and those feelings still hold, but hey, at least this year I'm going to have companies try to make money off me with a colour I actually can get on board with! I wasn't feeling last year's Emerald or the previous year's Tangerine Tango, so FINALLY! Come get my money with a colour I actually like, companies! Haha.

Radiant Orchid is Pantone's Color of the Year for 2014. Here are my Radiant Orchid-ish makeup items!

Anyway, before I get all ready to get my commercialization on (yay retail therapy!), out of curiousity, I thought I'd just run through my beauty stash and pull out all the Radiant Orchid-colour-alikes I already have in my stash, and show them to you guys - and really also to myself, as a reminder to not bust my budget when Sephora puts out their Sephora X Pantone Radiant Orchid Limited Edition Makeup Set with Unicorn Whiskers, or whatever they have up their sleeve. Just a little reminder to myself. So here we go!

All the Radiant Orchid products we'll be bombarded with soon in the coming months! LOL! (Source)

An Ingredients Analysis of Colour Changing Lipsticks, Lipglosses, Lipbalms, and Blushes

Ever since Smashbox put out its O-Glow blushes and lipglosses, Dior put out its Dior Lip Glow, and Sephora put out its Color Reveal Lip Balm, it seems like colour-changing lipglosses have been exploding over the blogosphere. There are so many breathless reviews on how it's changing into the "perfect shade of pink", or how it "reacts with the skin's pH" to give you a customized shade, and there are also equally many reviews disliking the pepto bismo pink it changes into on them. And, there are (of course) a lot of comparison swatches between the various types of colour-changing glosses.

I've had a few of these - you can see one that I reviewed here. Back then, I had written that I was suspicious of all those lipglosses claiming to know my body chemistry and pH, and I had written, "in my experience these turn into some generic shade of super-bright pink." So, since all the hype has been going on, I thought I'd do a little bit of the ingredients-analysing that you guys all know and love, and explain just how it is that these glosses/lipsticks/lipbalms/blushes do their work!

With these products, you'll always have a PH-relevant/skin-chemistry-relevant/hocus-pocus-magic-quality relevant shade!

Of course, as the nice little graphic summary I did above shows, we know that these types of lipglosses, lipsticks, and lipbalms have been around for quite awhile. In fact, there are so many of them - in addition to the Dior, Smashbox, and Sephora versions, Mark by Avon, Duwop, Jemma Kidd, and NYX Cosmetics have all jumped on the bandwagon at some point in time. And it's not just US brands that are donig it - Essence Cosmetics and Barry M from Europe have done it too. And even outside the West, other brands have done it - there's Lipice in Asia, and even a strange Morrocan Hare brand from (where else) Morroco! And it's not just lipgloss or lipstick! Cheek products have also been given the special treatment, with Stila, Smashbox and Givenchy all have blush versions to give you that pH-adjusted cheek colour.

So yes, we know everyone loves a colour-changing lipstick/balm/gloss/blush. And who can blame us for loving it? The novelty of seeing the colour change on your lips and cheeks is quite something, I'll admit. The thing is, are they really all that different from one another? How on earth are they even changing colour in the first place? You know that if this post involves some ingredients analysis, there's no better place to start than the ingredients list!

So, for this post, I'm going to look at as many ingredient lists of such colour changing products that I can dig up, including lipbalms, glosses, and lipsticks, and blushes, and see what we can learn from there! In true geek style, there are 10 of them (yes, TEN!), so buckle up!