There's no doubt that bold, matte lip color is classic and impossibly chic -- but we can relate if the word "matte" causes hesitation, since these products tend to draw attention to dry lips.
For this, makeup extraordinaire Bobbi Brown suggests applying eye cream to freshly exfoliated lips (you can use your toothbrush or a lip scrub for this). Starting this way will give you a smooth, hydrated surface to work with.
Lips nicely prepped, use a lip brush to line and fill in your lips with a bright coral-red, slightly creamy, matte-finish lipstick (try Chanel Rouge Allure Velvet in La Pettilante, $36). If needed, sign off with a coat of matte-finish lip balm (such as Peter Thomas Roth Matte Lip Balm, $11) to keep the color from flaking throughout the day.
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Easy Creamy
Not every elegant lip look has to be 100 percent sheen-free. Sitting happily at the intersection between matte finish and full-on gloss is cream lipstick, which features a smooth application and gel-like consistency, and tends to be noticeably more hydrating than its matte counterpart. Without the need to layer gloss on top of stick on top of liner, cream lipsticks are a less involved, but no less graphic, approach to red lips -- perfect for applying on the go and touching up easily throughout the day. (Recreate Emma Stone's creamy orange-red look with Revlon Ultra HD Lipstick in Gladiolus, $7.99).
Red lips are the little black dress of beauty -- glamorous, feminine, timeless. So timeless in fact that the use of red lipstick dates back to ancient Egypt, when Mesopotamian women would decorate their pouts in crushed semi-precious stones.
All that effort makes sense when you consider the facts. Lips are the body's most exposed erogenous zone, and even the softest brush against their sensitive nerve endings sends a wave of information to the brain telling us, that feels good.
So, like a good push-up bra, red lipstick only serves to enhance our goods. In fact (despite the rumors), men systematically prefer red lips on women. Get this -- in 2010, scientists from Manchester University showed groups of men a series of random images of women, and concluded that ladies with red lips received "the most prolonged gaze."
All things considered, you'd think red lips would be every woman's go-to look. But it takes Cleopatra-sized confidence to pull them off.
Here, your be-all-end-all guide to finding your perfect red -- the one that will give you the confidence and allure of a modern-day queen.
