Review: Milani Crystal Gloss for Lips in Sheer Dark Honey

This was purchased for me, by my husband, at Dollar Tree. Availability, unknown.

I have used two other of the Milani glosses in the format so far, one with great success and one with much failure. I was not sure how this gloss would work out when it came up for use on the What's New Wednesday list I have.

Review: Milani Lip Intense Liquid Color in 02 Pink Rave

This was purchased for me by my husband at Dollar Tree within the last couple of weeks from when I tried this; availability is uncertain.

This is actually something, I learned after trying it, that I cannot continue to use. I am allergic to mangos and there is mango butter in this, which explains why my lips started to hurt after a while and why my throat got a bit painful. But I did use it on Wednesday and for a very short bit on Saturday before I figured out it was what was causing the problem and checked the ingredient list.

Review: Milani Crystal Gloss for Lips in #23 Raspberry Icing

This was purchased for 75% off at CVS during one of their semi-annual clearance sales, not sure of availability.

This was an interesting lip gloss to try out because this was one of those cases of the first time I applied it, I thought it looked nice, but every time after that, it ended up being a pain to get to look the way I thought it was supposed to.

This is a gloss, it does impart some color effect to the lips, but it is not opaque. There are shimmer particles in the gloss, they are hard to see once on the lips, but do catch the light while on the lips. The gloss itself is moderately tacky in texture, not tacky enough to make the lips stick together, but also not tacky enough to keep the shimmer particles, which appear to be the main source of the color, in a uniform coating on the lips. What seems to happen after a period of time, that varies depending on how much you rub your lips together or talk, is that the particles all transfer to the edge of the gloss, and therefor the center of your lips, depending on what is underneath the gloss, is a different color from the outlier line of your lips. It did not travel outside of the lip line and the center did stay glossy, just not the same color as the rest of the lips.

I tried this on its own a few times on Wednesday, May 13th. The first time it applied well and I didn't think about it too much, but noticed after a couple of hours, maybe three, that the gloss looked a completely different color from what it was when it was applied. Upon further inspection, it appears all of the shimmer particles transferred out of the gloss, and what was left appeared as a very hot pink lip color. So I removed and reapplied, but could not get the same appearance has I had achieved earlier in the day. I tried a couple more times to get the gloss to go on the same way as the first time over the course of the day, with no luck.

On Saturday, May 16th, I tried this a few times with the lip balm I am currently using from Bath & Body Works in honeylicious and a Max Factor lip liner that I am trying to use up. Again, not much luck in getting the shimmer particles to stay in place. Although the balm did seem to succeed in making the lip gloss feel less sticky on the lips. I was actually a little surprised that the gloss did not seem to lift any of the color from the lip liner as I applied the gloss, which I see as a positive.

If I try this again it will be over a lip stick that is the same color as the gloss appears in the tube as I think that is the only way you will not eventually end up with two-tone lips, but I am not sure as I have not tried that yet. Testing farther is needed. But for now, this is going into the night makeup bag because of application issues and the color changing issue. I do have one of these that I have used in a cream color with no shimmer particles that I do not remember having this problem with, but it has also been a while since I used that one so my memory may not be totally reliable. 

Holiday Nails: Easter 2014

So this year I decided to go for a less is more approach and discovered something in my collection of nail polishes that I didn't realize worked the way it did.