Putting my money where my mouth is (two lipgloss reviews).

Now that I make my own money, I pay more attention to how I spend it (which probably explains how I am able to remember the prices of every single meal I have). Lipgloss is something that I rely on pretty heavily – I despise my eyes so whenever I have the chance I hide them with sunglasses of various shapes, and tried to draw attention to the lower part of my face. I own several lipsticks too, all various shades of bright red, but bright red is a little too out there for the working world, and as such, lipgloss is somewhat of a close friend of mine.

So as a lipgloss enthusiast as well as a frugal economist (in the very literal sense of the word there – my degree is in Economics), I thought it worth parting with a few of my hard-earned pennies in order to partake in a little experiment. I bought two lipglosses on Friday, a Benefit one from the Debenham’s in Oxford Circus for £14 (in doing so overtaking my Soap and Glory Sexy Motherpucker lipgloss as my most expensive lipgloss buy at £9), and then in the Boots near Charing Cross Train Station, I bought a MUA lipgloss for a quid. So the laws of demand and supply say that the Benefit lipgloss should be 14 times better than the MUA.

And… you can’t argue with economics! The Benefit lipgloss PWNS the MUA lipgloss! The MUA lipgloss isn’t bad, per se, but I have a lot of them just like it; the gloss comes out dry and sparse on the brush and when I apply it to my lips the look isn’t so drastically different as if I’d just licked my lips. It earns points for having a nice fruity scent to it, being well-presented (the vivid red of the tube is thoroughly eye-catching) and ease of use, so I’m planning on keeping it in my handbag and using it during the week for work, as I don’t need to ~glam up~ hugely for work-time, just look presentable.

However, as a lipgloss, the Benefit one is in a league of its own. The scent is very strong when you open the tube – a sweet, lavenderish smell that I took to immediately, and whilst the appearance is a sparkly lilacish colour, I found the name of the lipgloss – Kiss You – a more accurate indicator of its prowess, for, once you’ve applied this one your lips, you will just feel so fabulous that you want to kiss people, ha. The gloss is thicker in quality, which accounts for the smaller bottle, so you only need the tiniest amounts. I put a tiny tab across my bottom lip, a tiny dab across my top lip, then smush the two together. And the effects are sensational! My lips genuinely do shimmer, and for a long time after as well. A fantastic buy, well worth the £14. I keep taking the cap off to smell it and try it on over and over again, and if my obsession continues, Kiss You is on course to be the top lipgloss I've ever owned.

So what I learned in that experiment, then, was that money does make the difference, and that, in this case at least, the more expensive product most certainly is the better product. I think I’ll be conducting this comparison test on other products in the future, to see if the pattern holds.


Benefit Kiss You lipgloss: A
MUA lipgloss: C