Update: Sadly, Burts Bees discontinued this lovely lip gloss

When I was in high school I wore makeup almost every day. I was especially fond of red lipstick and I wore dark matte colors – never lip gloss. Lip gloss was for the girly girls and I was a dark and brooding art class girl with a leather jacket and a tough attitude.
These days I still wear lipstick but I’ve toned it down a touch. I still don the almost-black-but-really-it’s-dark-purply-red lipstick that I loved so much back then, but usually only when I’m getting all done up for an event. Now that I see clients who look to me for advice about their skin, I stick with more accessible colors on the day to day. And this means that sometimes I get tired of wearing lipstick.

So at Walgreen’s one day, I saw Burt’s Bees Super Shiny Natural Lip Gloss (discontinued – broken link – broken heart) in Zesty Red and I thought, “why not? it’s Burt’s Bees AND it’s red”.

Here’s how I use it:
Sometimes I put it on top of lipstick. While this gives the lipstick more depth of color and makes my lips shiny, I don’t care for it. It makes reapplication much more necessary than I like for lipstick.
However, when I wear it alone, it makes my lips feel super sexy and hydrated. My boyfriend says it looks pretty sexy too!

The upsides:
– It smells like orange, yum!
– It’s “100% natural” and has no petroleum products.
– It actually does hydrate lips – I don’t have to reapply from sticky or dried out lips when I use this product.
– The color is subtle but noticeable.

The not so upsides:
– I’m not a big fan of the applicator but it’s pretty standard. I prefer the rounded lip gloss applicators to the slanted ones.
– Like most lip glosses, the color is pretty subtle.

I like this product so much that I got a little gift set for my 10 year old cousin who I wanted to introduce to makeup (slowly – so her dad doesn’t kill me – he always hated that I wore so much makeup when I was a teenager). Her thank you note was full of exclamation points.