Archive for the ‘Lips’ Category:
Ok, so I must say that I’m pleasantly surprised by the “cumulative” effect that this City Lips lip plumping and enlargement product has had on my lips. I’ve been using it now for a little over one month (I can’t remember, it may even be six weeks, but it’s definitely been over one month). I can tell that it has made my lips a little bit fuller. It’s probably not really all that visible to the naked eye, but I’m so used to looking at my mug in the mirror every morning that I could detect a difference about 3 weeks into using the product.
City Lips is a higher end lip plumping product that advertises plumping your lips, and having an even more plumping effect over time, so the results are “cumulative”. I thought this was probably a bunch of bunk, but it does appear that the longer you use it, the better results you get.
Now don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to get voluptuous model plump lips from using this product, so don’t expect anything totally dramatic like you’d get in a doctor’s office with injections ala Jessica Biel.
However, it does add a nice definition, more pigment, and a nice plumpness and softness to your lips. I do use the lip enhancing product religiously every morning after exfoliating my lips, and again at night after my shower and after lip exfoliation as well, so I used it to it’s fullest. I ordered 2 three packs to get the free shipping, and because the three packs were by far the best package deal. They are expensive, but one tube lasted me this long, and it’s past the 4 week mark.
I don’t use it overly liberally though, just a thin coat, and I open my mouth wide so it gets into all the lines for maximum plumping. What I really like about it too is that it slightly flushes your lips to a deeper red, but it doesn’t sting or burn like many other lip plumping products do, and it doesn’t dry your lips out.
Don’t expect this to act as a great long lasting moisturizer though. It looks glossy for about ten minutes, then it sinks in and gets to work, basically disappearing, after that time. If you’re looking for a lip plumper that’s also a long lasting gloss, I’d recommend Lip Fusion or Cushy Lips.
One drawback though is the packaging. I know a lot of people used to complain about the wand applicator before, not being able to reach the bottom of the tube and scrape out product, and therefore wasting product. They repackaged it, and now it’s a tube with a brush attached that you have to crank up to get the product out. Not crazy about that either, because you can’t even tell if you’re getting every cent out, but oh well, it’s last me this long…
I was on a mission a few weeks ago to research what the best lipstain or liptint was, that did the job of lightly and naturally staining, or tinting the lips, for hours, without totally drying them out like most other stains, even the higher end ones I tried, do. I came up empty handed, but I did see one promising one that’s only like $7 from the Avon company Mark, which is still made by Avon, but is geared more toward the younger women crowd with more “fun” trend products and colors to appeal to teens and twenty somethings.
It’s called Glossblossom by Mark, and it is supposed to do something pretty cool, although of course there were some mixed reviews on what it does, although I must say a fairly impressive amount of the reviews were positive. It is supposed to go on clear, then “blossom” on your lips and create the perfect pink shade for your complexion. Some of the lip plumpers on the market do that, they go on clear and make your lips turn a deeper color, but it is because they make them fill with blood and plump up, and they also irritate the top layer, making them appear red for a while.
Well, first of all, I’m skeptical that a product can know what your complexion is and therefore become just the right shade of pink to match your skin tone, and second of all, I thought it must be some sort of plumper formula, maybe with cinnamon or some other irritant, which is usually drying, to be able to “gradually” make the lips a stained color.
A lot of reviews on Glossblossom said that it turned their lips a perfect shade of pink, but there were a few women who said they were naturally very pale and that Glossblossom actually made their lips too dark of a pink color and looked bad with their skin tone. The majority of women though liked the pink color that it turned their skin, so that wa s good sign. I did read several reviews of Glossblossom that cautioned users to put on a good moisturizer or extra lip gloss with the product because it did dry their lips out fairly quickly.
The problem with most lip stains seems to be that because they absorb so completely into the lips due to their thin, liquid nature, they tend to dry out the lips as well. There is not a great formula yet that can make the lips a deeper but natural looking color, but also not make them appear dried out and even chapped after you apply it. If anyone has tried a great lip stain or lip tint – one that also plumps the lips would be great- that gave them naturally pretty results and also didn’t dry the heck out of their lips, please share that with us here.
I think I wrote about my embarrassing experience with a lip plumping pump a while ago. It’s a pump that is designed to mechanically puff your lips up and plump them by introducing suction (and hence a little bit of trauma) to them, to make them get puffier and fuller.
It’s a good concept, however, if you use it too often of a little too exuberantly, you could very well end up with bruised lips, which don’t go away very quickly and are pretty obvious. Then, to prevent people from thinking you’re in an abusive relationship or that you didn’t actually get punched in the mouth, you have to figure out how to address it!
There is a new product out that uses the pump idea with a lip gloss that is designed for lip plumping as well, called JolieLips, which I’m sure is supposed to somehow infer that you will get lips like the infamous Angelina Jolie if you use the product. It’s a little bulb-type pump that you put on your lips, according to instructions several times a day, and gently – need I say GENTLY again – use the suction devices to pull your lips out and plump them up.
Suction definitely works naturally to plump lips, but it’s very temporary, and you can easily end up with bruised lips when you first start to use it, until you figure out what kind of pressure you should be applying when plumping them. I think for someone who doesn’t mind carrying around something that could easily be construed as some sort of bizarre sexual device all day in their purse, and then taking the time to hid away and suck away at your lips, it’s a good product, but I don’t know many women who are willing to go through that kind of hassle and potential embarrassment just to get temporarily bee stung lips!
Since I don’t really have long reviews for either of these products, I figured I’d combine them into one review. They are really simple products, and they are just body care, so you can only go on for so long about the nuances of such products since there’s no real visible outcome as their is with cosmetics 
The first product review is for a lip balm that is meant mostly as a protective emollient against the sun’s rays, for those days at the beach or when you’re on vacation in a sunny destination and walking around in the sun a lot. It’s by Pharmaca, that company I had talked about previously that my mom and I explored in depth when we were vacationing in Berkeley California to see my sister. It’s a natural products shop, and it has all kinds of nutritional and treatment supplements based on herbs and naturopathy, and it also has all kinds of natural beauty and self care products that are based in a non chemical formulation.
If you’re aiming to go more natural, this place was like heaven for you to shop in. One of the products I found there was a small lip balm stick, just the size of a chapstick, called ginger SPF lip balm. It was pure white, so you could see that it had zinc in it to protect your lips, but it also had soothing ginger in it which also happened to smell great if you like those kinds of more earthy scents like I do. It wasn’t the best as far as moisturization goes, since the zinc in it made it too hard to rub off on the lips, but it was a great sun protection factor for your lips. They didn’t burn or get chapped at all when I was in the sun all day.
The second review is for Body Shop Vitamin E body butter. There’s really not much to say about this product. It’s highly emollient, and it’s actually light enough to absorb into your skin. Overall, I wans’t impressed by the laundry list of chemicals I found in the ingredients, and I won’t be buying it again as I thought they tried to base their products mostly on natural ingredients. Oh well, I’ll probably still use it here and there for heavy moisturization needs, it was my free gift with purchase after all.
I wrote recently about how I had gotten a whole bunch of Avon makeup and cosmetic products from Amazon (free shipping if you spend over $25 by the way). And Avon products are so well priced to begin with, you get a ton of bang for your buck. However, as I’ve mentioned before, some of the Avon products are the epitome of the saying that you get what you pay for. I’m not a big fan of their lip tints of lipsticks for example. They don’t stay on very long, and they also tend to dry your lips out. Their color concentration isn’t all that great either.
However, they make a great lip balm. The Care Deeply line puts out a clear lip balm with aloe in it that’s only a buck and works great. It’s highly emollient, so a little goes a long way, and it makes you realize that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get an effective lip balm. I had tried out the Slick Tints before, which are tinted stick lip balms, and those weren’t really all that effective as a balm, but they did add a nice color to the lips.
Glazewear liquid lip color is one that I’ve tried. While the color is nice, you can tell instantly that as soon as you put it on, it’s not going to stay on long. I think that it wore off after a few sips of water actually, and it also made my lips dry out quickly, unlike some of the better, higher end lip glosses that I’ve tried. One trait I do like about the Avon product line is that they offer so many cool, modern colors that are relevant to what is in at the time, I just wish the quality of some of it was better.
Oh, by the way, Patrick Dempsey’s wife now has some products with them – her name is Jillian. I think she may be a makeup artist by trade. Their website has some useful makeup tips also if you want to check it out, it’s a good read for some new ideas to spice up your makeup application routine and maybe try some new techniques or colors.
The mother of the now infamous octuplets, Nadya Suleman has become an overnight subject of debate, scrutiny and of course, ridicule by the American media and public after she went to a fertility doctor and was artificially inseminated with enough fertilized eggs to create 8 tiny little bundles of joy. That’d be all fine and dandy, except Ms. Suleman, just in her early thirties, already has 6 previous children that she can barely afford to support, and she’s on welfare.
So, yeah, no one, including me, is happy that the tax payers are picking up the tab for her children, and an irresponsible fertility doctor who should be seriously reviewed for his practices, is responsible for allowing this to happen. I mean, I think we’re all wondering, isn’t there some sort of screening process for women who want to be artificially inseminated, for their abilities and financial wherewithall to take care of children, especially when they already have six mouths to feed? It doesn’t seem right, so you can imagine why there is public outcry right now abou this.
I’m not challenging anyone’s right to having babies, and as many as they want, but there comes a point when it is just plain old irresponsible and self indulgent when one cannot even afford the ones they already have. Add to the mix that she has admitted past psychological problems, and you seem to have a ticking time bomb on your hands. Nadya Suleman is now also being scrutinized for something a lot of people, including me, have picked up, which is the fact that she appears to have altered her appearance to look like the famous quintessential mother of all mothers in the spotlight, Angelina Jolie.
It’s undeniable if you see pictures of her that she resembles the famous actress and mother of six, although she’s definitely not as genetically gifted from the start. Her lips appear to have blown WAY up surgically, either by lip enhancement implants, or by some sort of injectable filler, because she has that “duck lip” effect where the edges of her lips don’t form naturally, and when she speaks it seems as if she has not even been used to having these lips either, there’s something unnatural about it. No one’s uncovered the dirt on this, but I’d be willing to bet she’s visited a surgeon, perhaps for more than just lips too.
She also looks like she has copied Ms. Jolie’s hairstyle and color as well, adding an even more eerie feeling that we have a sort of deranged, obsessed copy cat on our hands. Wonder if Ms. Jolie should be worried? I kid of course, but to me this is obviously a case of someone who does not have a true identity of their own. Suleman has been asked about whether she is trying to emulate Jolie and she has flat out denied it, saying that she barely even knows who she is, only having seen her a few times on the cover of gossip magazines.
Hmm, I smell some serious BS here. Seriously, there needs to be regulations that prevent this sort of thing from happening. We have families who live socially responsible lives who are struggling, like we really need to be paying for deranged baby addicts too at a time like this. See natural ways to plump the lips if you want naturally full lips or want to read more about products that can be applied topically to achieve a puffier pout.
A beautiful smile really does add so much to a person’s face when they are happy. Actually, I think everyone’s smile is beautiful, simply because it means you have some personality and are a happy person! But not everyone is so happy with their own smile, as evidenced by a new treatment with the botulism based Botox, which is supposed to help reduce the “gum” factor in smiles for patients who feel too much of their gums shows when they smile, making them self conscious about something they should feel free to share with the world when they’re expressing happiness or joy.
A cosmetic dentists provided the overview fo the treatment on a video I watched, and it’s basically using Botox as a way to help relax the muscles that pull back too much when a person smiles, reducing the amount of “gumminess” in a person’s smile, but still allowing them to freely and openly smile without feeling self conscious about it. Just when I thought I’d heard of every beauty treatment!
I have to admit I got squeamish while watching the video, because they showed the needle being inserted way up by the corner of the nose (who knew your smile muscles were up that high?), and it didnt’ look like a very pleasant experience. After all, who does like having needles plunged into their face, even if they don’t go very deep?
The Botox treatment for a better smile runs around $300, and of course that probably depends on the demographics where you’re getting it done. It’ll be more expensive in say, Beverly Hills than it would be here in the Cleveland Ohio area most likely. Honestly, I saw a before and after picture of the patient’s smile, and it did make a difference in how high her smile went in the corners of her mouth, but I thought her smile looked much better and more genuine before, but that’s just my opnion and the patient did seem happy with her results, which is of course, all that matter!
Well, this certainly isn’t a story that any woman wants to read, it actually somewhat like a story from a horror novel if you want to know that truth, at least the headline did to me. The beautician is based out of New York and is a woman, and she is charged with disfiguring two clients with injections into their face that they thought were a combination of collagen and other beauty enhancers, but in fact when tests were done they were closer to pure silicone, which cannot be injected right into the body without side effects.
The injections ended up severely disfiguring both women’s lips to the point that they could barely talk or eat, and they pursued legal action against the woman for using something that clearly was not approved to be injected directly into the skin without serious repercussions as they had. The women have both had to have several surgeries to try to fix the disfigurement, and have been left with many scars from the procedures, so they definitely have right to sue.
Of course the beautician’s attorney claims there was no wrong done to the women, and in fact claims that his client did not ever even treat one fo the women. The truth will come out as this story unfolds in the courtroom, and it should be interesting to see if the outcome is in this woman’s client’s favor or in the favor of her.
If you’re looking for fuller lips and don’t want to risk the pain and discomfort and cost of cosmetic injections, look at these lip plumper reviews to see how products applied topically can pump your lips up to their individual max by increasing moisture retention and helping to plump out creases, making them fuller and poutier looking.
I just got a great new color from the Mac line of lip glosses called Plush Glass. I really like Plush Glass a lot, not only for it’s remarkable ability to stay on the lips forever without getting gummy or gross, but also because it’s color goes on really sheer, and not pasty looking or too glittery at all, although I do wish they had a better selection of more muted colors in this line.
The new color I got is a bit darker than what I usually go for, called Pop Sugar. It’s a darker mauve-ish sort of color that will go great with fall colors, and will look good when I eventually dye my hair a bit darker for the winter season. I noticed that they didn’t have a great selection of colors in their Lip Glass either, or else I may have tried that, but I don’t like the fact that some of their lines have brush applicators and others have the sponge applicator, which I’m partial to.
It seems like they should offer both options with both products for those of us that are a little pickier about how the applicators are, like me. Mac also had some great fall colors for the eyes, with their notorious rich hues for those that like to dare to wear the darker, more dramatic colors in the winter time, which allows for those darker, richer tones.
I just read something interesting and actually scary too, and it has to do with one of my favorite beauty products, shiny lip gloss. However, I am glad that when I apply any type of shiny lip gloss I already put a balm underneath it, usually one with SPF after reading this startling information.
Dermatologists and cancer specialists are saying the shiny lip glosses and balms, when worn alone and without SPF in them or with SPF underneath, can increase the risk of skin cancer where applied because the shininess attracts the sun’s damaging ray’s and increases the likelihood of the skin on the lips burning.
This does make sense though, because if I think to days when I’ve done this, it almost always had resulted in my lips getting burned, which is no fun. While I didn’t think of the skin cancer aspect, I did hate getting my lips burned because this always resulted in dry, flaky lips and a parched feeling that was hard to get to go away, as well as days of peeling.
So the moral of the story is to ALWAYS have a lip balm that has a protective SPF factor in it. I think the waxier ones that tend to stay on longer are probably the best choice for protecting against sun exposure, so you can buy Chapstick brand with SPF or one of the special brands that actually is made specifically for protecting the lips from sun exposure.
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