A Little Color, Without the Routine That Usually Comes With It
Some of us wear almost nothing, on purpose. That is not the same as wanting to wear nothing at all.
Already curious? See the Areliaa lip kit.
Four things on the counter, and you know all four
There is a version of getting ready that takes ninety seconds, and plenty of women have been doing it for decades. Wash, moisturize, hair, done. The counter holds a few items you actually use, and the reason it holds only a few is that everything else was tried once and quietly retired.
None of that is neglect. It is a preference, and it is usually a considered one. You watched people spend forty minutes on a face and decided that trade was not for you.
But there is a small thing that keeps coming up. You see yourself in a photograph somebody took at lunch, and you look fine, and you also look slightly unfinished around the mouth. Not tired. Just a bit washed out in a way that a little color would have fixed.
That is a narrow want. It is not a want for a makeup routine.
Lipstick almost never gets sold as one step
Here is the trouble. Lip color is rarely offered to you as a single item. It arrives attached to a method.
You are told to exfoliate first so it sits evenly. To line the edge so it holds its shape. To keep the tube on you for the rest of the day. To pick a shade that works with your blush, which presumes blush. Half the advice assumes the rest of a face is happening, and you were only ever going to do the one thing.
Then there is the shade itself, which has the same problem in a quieter form. A defined color is built to sit inside a finished face. Put it on a bare one and it is the only thing in the frame, so it carries the whole composition by itself. At eleven in the morning, with nothing else on, a color that looked correct in the tube can read as though it wandered in from a different occasion.
So the tube goes in the drawer, and the conclusion you draw is that lipstick is not for you. The more accurate conclusion is that lipstick as usually sold asks for a production, and you were never in the market for one.
One formula instead of a wall of shades
Areliaa's Signature Lipstick starts from somewhere else. There is one formula rather than a range, so there is no shade to decide on before anything happens.
The bullet is close to colorless, with flecks of gold visible inside it, carried in a balm base of squalane, jojoba seed oil and vitamin E. The pigment it holds, CI 45410, reacts to pH. It develops its color on contact with the moisture at the surface of your lips, which means the tint appears while you are wearing it rather than being chosen in advance.
You apply it directly, the way you would any lipstick. There is no preparation step built into how it works.
One step, and here is what it comes to
The tint that develops is a soft one, and how it looks varies from person to person. That soft register is the reason it suits this reader in particular: on a face that is otherwise bare, a little color reads as finished and a lot of color reads as an event. It needs reapplying, the same as any lip color. And it will not give you a specific bold shade you can name and count on, because there is no shade in the tube to name.
So the whole of it is this. Put it on, put it on again later, keep the tube with the four things you already use. That is a fifth item on the counter and a step that takes about as long as finding your keys.
Nothing has to happen before it and nothing has to happen after it. Skip a day and there is nothing to get back on top of, because a single step cannot fall behind. That is the difference between a step and a routine, and it is the entire reason this one tends to survive in a house where other things did not.
What the other five are for, on the days you want them
The lipstick arrives inside a six-piece kit, and six pieces is the sort of thing you have spent years declining. Worth knowing, then, that the other items are not a sequence. They are separate small things with their own times.
The scrub is a once or twice a week item, the sort of thing you might do on a Sunday evening. The plumper goes on before lipstick, on a day you feel like a bit more. The gloss is a finish you can add over the top or ignore entirely. The collagen mask is for bedtime, when nothing else is competing for the two minutes.
Not one of them is a gate the lipstick has to pass through, and none of them has to be kept up to stay useful. They sit in a drawer until a Sunday evening or a late night comes around. The lipstick stays the daily step, and the rest is there when you want it.
The Signature Lipstick is sold inside the Areliaa Complete Lip Kit, which is where to go if the one step is what you are after and the other five can wait their turn.
A counter with five things on it instead of four. That is the whole of the change being proposed here.
Areliaa Complete Lip Kit
$59.97
- Two Signature Lipsticks
- Lip Scrub, Lip Plumper, Lip Gloss, Collagen Mask
- Shipping calculated at checkout
Returns can be requested within 90 days of receipt under the retailer’s policy. Approval is required, return postage is paid by the customer, and original shipping fees are excluded. Full policy.