Why Is This Lipstick Almost Colorless in the Tube?
There is gold suspended in the bullet and hardly any color at all. The color is not in the tube, and that turns out to be the whole idea.
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The product photo that stops people
You have probably scrolled past it by now, or something like it. A gold tube with a clear square base, and standing up out of it a bullet that is close to colorless, with small flecks of gold suspended inside it the way something gets caught in a paperweight.
Every part of it reads as lipstick except the part that matters. There is no color in it.
The first guess is usually that the picture shows an empty tester, or a balm that wandered into the wrong category. The second guess is that it is a gimmick. Both are fair guesses, and neither one is what is going on.
Every other lipstick shows you its color before you buy it
Think about how you have chosen every lipstick you have ever owned. The color was visible in advance. It sat there in the bullet, or in a row of caps, or on a printed card of shade names in a font too small to read without leaning in, and you picked whichever one looked right in front of you.
That visible color is the entire proposition of an ordinary lipstick. It is what you are paying for, it is what the packaging exists to show off, and it is the only part of the product anyone can demonstrate before you get it home.
So a bullet with nothing in it looks like a product with its main feature missing. That reaction is reasonable. It is also the point at which most people stop reading and scroll on, which is a shame, because the explanation is short and it is not a trick.
It does not help that the tube photographs as decorative rather than experimental. Gold case, clear square base, flecks caught inside the bullet like something set in resin. An object that pretty invites you to admire it and then move on, and almost nothing about the picture prompts the obvious question, which is where the color is meant to come from.
The color is not in the bullet
Areliaa's Signature Lipstick carries a pigment called CI 45410, and that pigment reacts to pH. Sealed in a tube, dry, sitting at room temperature, it has nothing to react to. That is why the bullet looks the way it does in the photograph.
It develops its color on contact with the moisture at the surface of your lips. You are not putting color on. You are putting on something that becomes color once it arrives.
Which is what makes the first application the unfamiliar part of owning one. The bullet goes on looking like very little. The tint comes up while it is being worn, so what you end up looking at in the mirror is not what the tube showed you, because the tube was never in a position to show you it.
The rest of the bullet is what lets it travel there: a balm base of squalane, jojoba seed oil and vitamin E. The gold flecks sit in that base, and they are the reason the tube looks like an ornament rather than a cosmetic. They are not where the tint comes from. What does the work is a pigment that carries almost no color until it is worn.
So the photograph is accurate, and it is showing you the unusual thing about the product rather than hiding the ordinary one. There is no finished shade in that tube because a finished shade is not what is being sold.
What that actually gets you
Here is the plain version. The tint that develops is a soft one, and how it looks varies from person to person. It is lip color in the ordinary sense: you can see it, and so can anyone looking at you. It is not a transformation, and it was never built to be one. It needs reapplying, the same as any lip color you have owned. And it will not give you a particular bold shade, the kind you can name and expect to see the same way every time, because there is no shade in there to name.
What it does instead is take the choosing out of the front of the process. There is one formula rather than a range, so there is nothing to select, nothing to compare against a face you are not currently looking at, and nothing to be slightly wrong about. You put it on and you find out, which is what happens with a lipstick anyway, only sooner and without the shade card.
What comes in the box
The lipstick is sold on its own, and it is also the center of the Complete Lip Kit. The kit holds two of them, along with four companion products for the rest of a lip routine: a scrub for one or two uses a week, a plumper that goes on before the lipstick, a gloss as an optional finish and a collagen mask at bedtime.
None of the four is a gate the lipstick has to pass through. It works by itself, and on an ordinary morning it is the only one of them you need to pick up.
If the photograph is what brought you this far, the tube in it is the Areliaa Signature Lipstick, and the Complete Lip Kit is where it is sold.
A bullet with no color in it is a strange thing to look at. It stops being strange the moment you know the color was never supposed to be there.
Areliaa Complete Lip Kit
$59.97
- Two Signature Lipsticks
- Lip Scrub, Lip Plumper, Lip Gloss, Collagen Mask
- Shipping calculated at checkout
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