~~~Introduction~~~

I stumbled upon this product some months ago whilst mooching around Superdrug and have to say that I was intrigued by the 'duo' concept. Here you have a long lasting lipstick that claims to last up to 16 hours and a conditioning balm to moisturise your lips once the lipstick is on and add a touch of gloss. Brilliant I thought, you could even mix things up a bit and just wear the lipstick for a matt effect or use the balm for some natural looking glossed lips. An excellent idea but sadly that's where the excellence begins and ends in regards to this product.

~~~~Cost and packaging~~~

The packaging itself is fairly quirky and certainly unique, the lipstick and balm come stacked side by side in what I would describe as a 'cutesy miniature storage unit'. The unit has clearly been designed with a purposefully mirrored surface as further selling point, so that your duo lip kit becomes a very suitable 'on the go' handbag item. Unfortunately the gadgety looking lip duo was plastic vacuum packed in the shops making my usual pre-buy closer inspection off limits.

The first thing you'll note once the plastic is off, is just how fiddly and awkward the whole thing is. Trying to remove your lipstick and balm are just far more of an effort than need be, I soon found myself wondering what the point in this storage unit was aside from the reflective surface that you soon finds scuffs and scratches at the drop of a hat anyway.

For a product that has used its packaging as a clear marketing tool, up close and personal with an opportunity to fiddle with it you soon realise that it's actually over complex, cheaply made and in my opinion bordering on tacky. At around £10 a pop you become more than aware that most of your pennies have gone into the over design of a packaging that in practice fails to deliver a consumer friendly ease of use.

~~~Use and Opinion~~~

Once I had thumbed to death the unit in an attempt to free my brand new lippy and balm from the evil clutches of a clearly overzealous design teams last minute idea, I finally had the opportunity to experiment with my new make-up bag items.

The range has 11 different colours and I choose 'Spice for Days'. Pulling off my cheap looking lipstick lid I was pleased to discover that the colour I had chosen looked much as it had promised on the packaging (there were no shop testers for this product, probably due to the nature of its packaging). I applied the lipstick just as I would any other but immediately encountered yet another problem. Firstly the lipstick does not spread evenly, settling in some areas whilst blotching in others. More notably, my lips became very dry and almost visably cracked as soon as the lipstick was applied. I pursed my lips together in an attempt to spread the lipstick only to discover yet another problem, congealing lumpy lipstick! The lipstick just seemed to smear and clump as opposed to glide and spread as it should. I very quickly found myself huffing and puffing around my bedroom mirror picking off hundreds (slight exaggeration) of tiny lipstick lumps.

After picking bits off of my lip for a good 10 minutes I was pleased to be moving onto the balm and hoped that it might help spread the lipstick a little better, resolve the dryness issue, moisten my lips and sooth my now slightly sore mouth! The balm I suspect is designed to be translucent and add both shine to the lipstick as well as moisturise (or 'condition' as the advertising states) your lips but you notice immediately that it is white in colour and somewhat murky looking. Applying it didn't change that fact and it didn't sit at all well on my lips, nor did it hydrate them or condition them as it had promised in its advertising. My lip colour looked uneven, my lips looked shrivled, dry and scaley with the balm now adding an oil slick like effect on top. I'd had enough and so had my lips. I was reasonably annoyed at this point, figuring that I'd have been better off just setting fire to my tenner than to have wasted so much time and effort on this product but looking on the bright side it wasn't as if I'd accidently dipped my lips in concrete and stuck myself to a wall, was it............Ummmm?

Trying to remove this lipstick from my lips was a far bigger task than removing it from the unit and applying it put together. Concrete, is no exaggeration it just doesn't budge, I must have washed and scrubbed at it 4 or five times before I got the make-up remover out, even then I was left with its annoying patchy reminisce. In fairness to L'Oreal the 'long lasting' pitch with its '16 hour'claim is certainly not false advertising but in my opinion an over investment in the staying power of this lipstick and the novelty packaging, has come at a great cost to the overall quality of the product. I think most of us would rather have to reapply our lipstick throughout the day than have it welded on like stiffly dried cement.

The next day the lipstick had almost completely worn off which was a bit of a relief because I was beginging to think that nothing short of a sand blaster was going to remove this stuff. Over the course of the following few days my lips remained dull and dry, needing a constant application of lip balm (not the smudge stick balm from my kit, I might add) to rehydrate them, a direct result of using this product.

All in all this is a very disappointing product from one of my favourite high street brands and certainly not one that I would purchase again or indeed recommend to anyone.

~~Also written on ciao under the same user name~~