Love the Look of: Matte Fuschia lips

Creamy semi-matte skin, clean eyes, and subtly-flushed cheeks leave matte fuschia-rose lips the focus at the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Fall 2011. I always wished I had the guts to wear strong lip colors on a day-to-day basis, but my lips are a bit too small to pull it off.

Well, I managed to find a highly-respectable dupe of whatever shade they used.

Meet “Shocking Pink” (#220), from the Rimmel Colour Show Off collection. Although I’m not sure how many countries it is available in currently. They’ve been available at my local drugstores for quite awhile, and I was never drawn to them because I swatched them in the store and immediately concluded that they were:

1. too matte
2. too bright

It was only when I was browsing around 5 minutes before popping into the local YMCA for my evening class, when I saw what looked like it might just be the perfect fuschia.

I couldn’t find a really good representation of the shade online. All the pictures, including the one above, look too blue or too red.

There isn’t really anything that “shocking” about it in real life, despite the name. It’s a rich, rich demi-matte rose-fuschia with an underlying current of warmth and electric heat that never quite shows up until you’re caught in the camera flash.

The texture is demi-matte, but not uncomfortably so, even for Ms. Flaky Lips here. And as the name suggests, the pigmentation is EXTREMELY high. One swipe is enough to give you a rich swatch of color.

Be warned though. It does tend to stain everything it touches until you can get hold of an industrial strength makeup remover. Plus points for tenacity, minus for stubborn-ness.