After 50, I Was Done Fighting My Lipstick. Then I Tried This.

For thirty years I wore the same red. Then one morning it looked wrong, and it kept looking wrong. This is what I found out, and the clear gold tube that ended it.

The morning my red stopped working

I had worn the same lipstick since my thirties. A proper red. It was part of how I did my face, the way you put your watch on. Then somewhere after fifty it started looking wrong. Not bad. Wrong. Harder than my face. It sat on my mouth like it had been drawn on by someone else, and by lunchtime it had crept into the little lines above my lip and I'd be scrubbing a pink ring off with a tissue.

So I did what every woman does. I bought nudes. I bought "your lips but better" pinks. I bought a lip primer. I bought a liner to stop the bleeding. The drawer in my bathroom had eleven lipsticks in it and not one that I actually wanted to wear.

What actually changes after 50

I asked the woman at the beauty counter, and for once I got a straight answer. Three things happen. Your lips lose some of their own colour, so a shade that used to blend now sits on top. They lose moisture, so pigment and wax dry them out and crack them by noon. And the skin around the mouth thins, so there are fine lines for the colour to run into.

Every lipstick I had bought was trying to fix one of those three with more of what caused it: more pigment, more wax, more layers. She said the women who stop fighting it usually go the other way. Less. A balm with colour in it, not colour with a bit of balm.

The clear tube with gold in it

My daughter-in-law sent me the link. A gold tube, and when I twisted it up the bullet was completely clear with flakes of gold floating inside. I honestly laughed. Then I put it on, and over about a minute it turned into a soft pink. Not a pink I'd chosen. A pink that came out of my own lips. It reacts to your warmth and moisture, so the colour is yours.

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The part I didn't expect

It's a balm. That's the thing. It has hyaluronic acid in it and it feels like the good lip balm you keep by the bed, except it has colour. By six o'clock my lips were softer than they'd been at eight in the morning. There was nothing to bleed into my lip lines because there's no heavy pigment sitting on top. And it was still there after coffee, after lunch, after the dog walk.

My husband said my mouth looked nice. He said it at dinner, unprompted, which has happened perhaps twice in thirty-one years of marriage. A woman at church asked what colour I was wearing and I didn't have an answer, because it isn't a colour. It's mine.

What I'd tell my younger sister

Stop buying lipsticks. Buy this one, and buy two, because they run a buy-one-get-one-free offer and the second one will end up with whoever you show it to. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, which I didn't need. The drawer of eleven tubes went in the bin.