So, beginning my posts about my collection!

Revlon is probably my favorite cheap brand, and I always end up picking several new items whenever I have longer than a few minutes to kill in a drugstore. I acquired two Just Bitten Kissable Balm Stains, in Honey and Crush, for a discount and then my friend didn’t want hers, in Adore.

Since this is also my first post in this series of digitalizing my collection, I figured I’d go with a product that is well-reviewed on the internet — my feeble attempts at photography should blend in better with a major product that has a thousand posts on it already!

So, Just Bitten Kissable Balm Stain: exactly what I thought and wanted Just Bitten Lipstain + Balm to be. Does anyone besides me think it is beyond stupid to call one product Lipstain + Balm (and make it kind of horrible) and another product Balm Stain? I mean, I realize that the packaging looks totally dissimilar and you really shouldn’t be able to get them confused. But Lipstain + Balm sucks. I have two. I will make a post on them. Kissable Balm Stains are pretty good.

Here, look, they look like crayons, like Clinique’s moderately more expensive version:

And thank cod they are retractable and don’t require sharpening. Once I use up all my pencil products that require sharpening, I’m done. Never again. I hate using sharpeners. Can someone give me one good reason why a company would go with regular pencils when excellent technology allowing for automation exists – besides cost of manufacture? For real, I am willing to pay more. I am probably actually willing to pay more by the factor of the cost of a sharpener to not have to use a sharpener.

Um, but these don’t actually have that problem. So we can move on.

They wear like a balm, kind of. Not quite like a real balm, but I don’t really like real balms, so that’s good. If I put real lip balm on my lips, it’s going to be real lip balm on my face in no time. My hair, whether in a ponytail or not, gets bogged down in it like a refrigerator in a sinkhole, and I pretty much eat whatever balm remains within ten minutes of application. Why would I eat lip balm? I don’t know. But Carmex has a limited life on me, so I prefer lipsticks and stains to glossy things. (And yet I buy lip glosses. And lip balms. I don’t understand.)

Surprisingly, I actually like all three shades. The two I chose, again, were Honey and Crush. Honey is a MLBB (!! terminology!!) kind of? Sort of. Crush is a little darker and…uh…more purple? Speaking of my inability to identify colors correctly, or actually even to identify them incorrectly, did anyone take XKCD’s color test while it was up? (Here’s a link to the entry talking about the data, which were pretty fascinating: Color Survey Results.) Well, I can’t identify colors, but maybe writing these posts will help me. So, Crush will go down in my blog’s inaugural chapter as a little “darker and more purple.” Let’s hope I get better at this.

Honey does turn a little more coral on me after wearing it for a bit, but I’m not sure whether that is a problem. Perhaps I will just walk around my office and see if anyone asks me what is wrong with my face? Crush is more…you guessed it…purple than I would wear on a regular basis at work, but I’ve played with it a bit and intend to wear it out at some point. Neither Honey nor Crush are sparkly.

The one I managed to get away with as a secondthought gift is Adore. My friend, who is paler than a sheet of paper, is always on the hunt for the right vampy lip color, and by vampy I mean black with a tinge of red. She bought Adore hoping that’s what it would be, and she was immediately dismayed upon opening it to discover that it’s packed with golden shimmer. Fortunately for me, she bought it from a place without a return policy so I am the recipient of her mistake — she knows that I would never cast aside a perfectly serviceable item of makeup, or anything really, for being sparkly, so into my collection it has weasled.

However, Adore kind of makes me look like a streetwalker with an even poorer sense of color theory than the person I really am. No offense to streetwalkers, either (though all offense possible intended towards my dismal understanding of color theory and also color words), but I wore it one day to the zoo with my parents because when I put it on that morning it seemed pretty tame. It changes colors, though, just enough to go from “oh that looks lovely, look at me being bold with my appearance-related choices here in the New Year” to “garish” in about ten minutes (ten minutes is just long enough, though, for you to think you look great in front of the mirror and then go out looking clownish). I will try wearing this one out to a bar at night or something, where clownish looks significantly more sexy.

As for performance of these fine products, I think they are pretty great. Here’s my arm after removing them:

This is after trying to take them off my arm without using makeup remover. Not bad. A half hour later, those smudges are still hanging out on my arm. I hope no one at work asks, because then I’ll have to explain what I did on my lunch break today…