Shine on! Why we've fallen back in love with lip gloss
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Loading... - Tomislav Peric
- 03 Jun 2022
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The first makeup item I remember buying was a lip gloss. It was a small pot of purple goo, made by Japanese brand Shu Uemura, and – even by today’s standards – pretty expensive at £16. I saved up for it, like I did for my Vivienne Westwood bustier and Air Max 98s. Because, like them, it was a status item. I applied it, performatively, any chance I got. This was in the late 90s – probably the last time I gave a second thought to lip gloss. These days, I’m more of lip balm person.
That may be about to change, though. Lip gloss, forgotten and gathering lint at the bottom of handbags for decades, is back. Possibly down to a nostalgia for the 90s and early 00s – and no doubt boosted by the phasing-out of masks – shiny lips are the beauty detail to focus on this spring, seen on catwalks at Fendi, Victoria Beckham and Blumarine, on celebrities ranging from Dua Lipa to Vanessa Hudgens, and on TikTok – where #lipgloss has more than 6bn views. Superdrug reports the category “flying off the shelves” the past year, while online retailer LookFantastic says there was an 11% rise in searches for lip gloss from 2020 to 2021.
As in the late 90s, there are status lip glosses – see Lisa Eldridge’s Gloss Embrace in the brownish Affair shade (a favourite of Lipa’s), Ami Colé’s Lip Oil Treatment (described by New York magazine’s The Strategist as “the Telfar bag of lip gloss”, NYX’s Butter Gloss (with 7.6m views on TikTok) and Beckham’s Posh Gloss, a knowing nod to her lip-gloss-centric makeup in the Spice Girls era.
Jacqueline Kilikita, senior beauty editor at Refinery29, puts the resurgence down to two factors. “First, our obsession with nostalgia, which increased during the tough pandemic,” she says. “There’s also a move towards more minimal makeup post-pandemic, and a slick of gloss is a quick and easy way to update any look.” She says the Y2K trend is “massive”, and that “as crop tops, low-rise jeans and chunky highlights made a comeback, so did gloss.” While Naomi Campbell, Posh Spice, Aaliyah and Pamela Anderson might be the inspiration, it’s not like for like. TikTok creators are “teaming clear or nude gloss with dark liner for a look that harks back to the 00s and 90s but feels modern.”
The formulations of lip glosses have improved since then. I can’t be alone in remembering that sticky feeling, and the way strands of hair got caught on your lips (an annoyance Miuccia Prada turned into a styling trick on the catwalk in 2013). Superdrug says that customers are after “skincare-makeup hybrids” and something like Eldridge’s Gloss Embrace or Jones Road Cool Gloss work because they feel more like a balm. This is, Eldridge says, thanks to a formulation based on fats. “Imagine if you were making a cake and used loads of butter and then added olive oil. It doesn’t evaporate off and it will stay on the lips … It doesn’t feel gloopy, and if you want to add more you can, but you don’t need to.”
Dr Ewoma Ukeleghe, followed on Instagram by 22.5k people for her skincare videos, is a recent convert for this reason. “I’ve had a moment wearing lipsticks, then lip balms, but now I’m loving lip glosses,” she says. “I think formulations and shade ranges have really developed over the years, making glosses the perfect option.” Favourites include Fenty Beauty Gloss Bomb in Cookie Jar and Tower28 ShineOn Jelly in Cashew.
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The move away from masks has helped the lip gloss trend, but another pandemic-related factor is a sort of laziness: we gravitate towards items that are low maintenance. Eldridge agrees with Kilikita about the ease of lip gloss. “You don’t need a mirror, you don’t need to be precise about it.”
This is a long way from the beginning of gloss. Originally, the product was associated with high glamour – it’s thought to have been invented around 1928 by Max Factor, and became popular in the movie industry in the 30s. “It was called lip pomade,” says Eldridge. Later, in the 70s and 80s – when roll-on lip gloss became the beauty accessory to flash – it worked with a disco aesthetic, where shine and glitter were essential for a dancefloor-ready look. Read More...
