Beauty on a Budget: L’Oreal Infallible Lipgloss Review
Last week I was picking up a few items at CVS for a swap I was doing when I noticed that L’Oreal Infallible Lip Gloss was on sale. The first thing that caught my eye about these is the awesome applicator and I was intrigued if they’d be any good. Since the price was right at Buy 1 Get 1 Free I decided why not! I’ll give it a shot.
Total cost for both, $9.99 USD plus taxes. Not bad right? I felt for sure I’d get them home and they’d be absolute rubbish but at least I didn’t shell out a whole lot of cash for them. Guess what? Turns out they aren’t too bad and possibly, with a little tweak here and there, could have potential awesomeness written all over them!
As I mentioned I was originally attracted to these due to the very nice sponge applicator that I prefer in lipglosses. Aube Gloss Frutina is famous for sporting a similiar sponge and Lancome’s better known, Color Fever Gloss. I will say that the sponge applicator on the L’Oreal Infalliable Lipgloss is actually better than both of those. It’s a generous size sponge, wider in size, and bent at a nice angle to make applying a generous amount of gloss to your lips easy with a flawless finish. I’d kill to have MAC adapt to these fantastic sponges! I find they pick up color so much better and offer almost a plumping effect when on. They also happen to apply a super generous amount of gloss to your lips which most regular sponge applicators fail at.
The color selection available is vast and I’d say there are about 15 to 20 shades to choose from, possibly more. I only selected two because at the time I didn’t realize how good these would truly be but the good news is I was clever enough to score a rain check when I was checking out so I can go back for a few more since I am enjoying them so much! The colors I selected were 305 Fiery and 125 Bloom. Fiery is a brownish copper shade that looks great with warmer shades where as Bloom is more of a fun bubble gum pink shade.
Fiery
Bloom
They deserve a rave for the pigmentation which is wonderful so staining your lips or applying lipstick beneath is entirely optional on your part. You can easily swipe on bare lips and have a killer, glossy shade of color minus a ton of layering! However, the taste is simply disgusting. I can’t put my finger on quite what the flavor is…it’s some sort of weird cross between fruity, vanilla, incense, patchouli flavor. Very strange! But luckily it goes away after a bit so you aren’t subjected to the horrible flavor for hours.
Staying power is promised at 6 hours and I’d say the gloss holds just enough stickiness to hold it on for about 2-3 hours maybe a bit more if you press it. However, I felt like the formula was slightly flawed. It goes on very nicely and has a minimal amount of tacky, sticky feel but I’ve made my peace with glosses that sport that particular problem however after about 10 or so minutes of having the gloss on it dries down to a rather weird, waxy feel. First application is comfortable and great but the dry down does irritate a bit. The strange waxy feel does not go away for the remainder of the time you have the gloss on and I can only assume that this is their solution to six hours of contentious wear. It’s rather strange when I wet my lips or lick my tongue over it but I guess I can get over that.
This is a tad bit off topic but it did rather peeve me so it’s worth a mention. When I got home I decided to look these up online and see what the review on the street was. I noticed both in reviews and adverts from various sites they mention a mirror being attached to the gloss. I later realized they meant the cap. The cap is mirrored however, for some odd reason, it peeved me that they choose to pimp this out as a feature when in fact it’s not even worth mentioning. The mirrored cap, in my humble opinion, is completely useless. You can’t use the cap for application considering the sponge applicator is attached to the cap. How the hell can you use the cap as a mirror? So strange they even bothered putting this in descriptions for the product! I even read a review where one girl said how convenient it was that the cap was mirrored. She could have possibly been drinking at the time, I’m not entirely sure. To give reviewers and retailers the benefit of the doubt I firgure that once applied I can just check my lips in the mirror after screwing the cap back into place but again useless. The mirrored cap distorts your image so it’s not exactly clear if your lips are looking great or not. That was a rather long rant but the Muse has to get her fifty cents in about the stupidity of the entire situation!
All in all for a drugstore beauty find these are actually pretty good. They do have some minor rants attached but I felt like it was one of the better products I’ve come across in my wanderings into the drugstore beauty world here in the US.
Even though it needs some work to be perfection it is affordable and it’s worth picking up if it’s on sale. I wouldn’t pay $9.99 USD per a gloss but I wouldn’t mind picking up a few more of these at the Buy 1 Get 1 price! $5 USD each for a pigmented gloss that has decent wear time plus looks very nice on isn’t too bad a splurge!
Tried these?
Love ’em?
Hate ’em?
What’s are your Beauty on a Budget lip gloss finds?
Tell the Muse!