Jessica Biel Misled Me About This Lip Stain Business

Here is my dumb ass after lip stain:

Not a flushed, sexy, Jessica-Biel-esque pout. More of a three-year-old-high-on-Kool-Aid pout. My lips are stained, alright. But it’s not a soft, seductive hint of color. It’s a dried-up streaky blotchy blurt of hue.

A closer look at the mess:

I’ve been applying lip product for at least 25 years, so I don’t think I did it wrong. It’s true I may have chosen the wrong color, but since there are no testers for these things in the Duane Reade down the street, I just picked one that seemed right for me. Not pink, not brown, just rosy. The color is “Gothic.” So perhaps my lips are meant to have that “baby vampire sucked her first victim dry” look. (As someone wrote when I Tweeted about it last night, “So it smokes clove cigarettes, listens to The Cure and is generally miserable?”)

The worst part? I should have known better! How many times have I been disappointed by a product and found it not exactly as advertised? How many times have I written about pseudo-false advertising? How many times have I laughed at the absurd promises? I’m going to look like Jessica Biel after making out with a male model? Yeah, right. And yet: I bought it anyway.

There’s no moral to this story, really. The lip stain is going in a makeup bag full of disappointing products; that makeup bag is going in a drawer; and I’ll forget about this incident until the next time. Has anyone tried that CoverGirl Outlast lip stain? It looks really good on Drew Barrymore…