In search of the Ultimate Red Lip Gloss

I thought I would glam up a bit for an outing, so I dug through the sultanas and Medicare receipts in the bottom of my handbag to find my favourite Chi Chi Lip Gloss. I applied it liberally only to find that it had gone rancid - not cool. So I threw it out and decided it would be quite an easy mission to find me a nice new red lip gloss. Ha!


I was shopping in Brisbane with my three best friends and we were poking through the make-up department in Myer. Faithful friend #643 walked with me as I went through all the major brands of make-up in search of the ultimate red lip gloss. We came upon the 'Kit' make-up counter, boy, was it cool. Fabulously named products and great packaging. We found a great red lip-gloss but it was in a tube, no wand and I thought it was a bit expensive at $19.95.


How silly I was not to purchase that item. And I have been kicking myself for weeks as my quest for my perfect lip-gloss has cost me dearly (am not going to write a dollar value as Friend #1 is reading over my shoulder).


I went straight to Myer in my home town the next day, thinking I could just buy a replacement Chi Chi one and be done with it. So I searched and tried on and purchased an identical replacement to the one I had thrown out. However, it wasn't until I got home and tried it on that I realised that the people at Chi Chi had slightly changed their formula or the name of the product, or I got the name of my lipgloss wrong. So, instead of a lip gloss to make me look groovy and fresh, I kind of looked like a blow up doll. Sigh.


I then bought a Sugar Baby lip-gloss which was darling. It had four shades of lip gloss in a very cute little compact. I could blend the shades into various combinations and the honey perfume was delicious. Although the texture, smell and packaging were great, the colour was not red. So my search continued.


In a spurt of desperate need for this item, I made a last ditch effort and decided I was not leaving a certain department store without a lip-gloss meeting my needs. Unfortunately for my five year old daughter, she was with me, poor lass. I methodically went through all the major brands; Revlon, Maybelline, Covergirl, Chi Chi (again) and Bourjois. Some were okay, but mostly they were rosy pink concoctions that were not what I was after. I found a close example in the Australis brand but the only one they had left had been opened and the ladies at the counter told me not to buy it as teenagers are known to try things on - eeewwww (they also told me to just put it back on the shelf - double eeewww!). By this stage my hand was looking very bizarre with every shade of pinky red stored on the shelves, now smeared on my hand. I went back through the department and stumbled upon the Rimmel display. There in a glossy red tube with a wand stood my current lip gloss. It is called 'Volume Booster, Lip Plumping Gloss' in a colour called 'Allure' costing $16.95. It is not quite as red as it could be - but dang it is close, but not as close as the 'Kit' one found weeks and weeks earlier.


The moral of the story? If you find something that is really really close to what you are after, it is worth paying a couple of dollars more to save yourself the angst of looking for something that you have already found. This can also be applied to that t-shirt you saw and loved, but thought was a wee bit too expensive, but your search for something similar took up large portion of your life - if you love it, it is at a decent price, buy it and spend the spare shopping time enjoying your purchase.