The other day, at a restaurant, I watched a glamour-puss re-apply her makeup in a single swipe. She simply removed a lip pencil from her bag, ran it deftly over her lips, and with that she was finished. The room was transfixed. Something is stirring in the cosmetic firmament, and it issues from an unlikely source. Lip liner, for decades either despised or ignored, is now acquiring main-character energy. No longer a basic, slightly persnickety tool to undergird lipstick or gloss, it is used to complement a dewy-skinned, glossy-haired, no-makeup makeup.
“I knew we had a winner, but I didn’t expect the Internet to love it quite so much,” says Bobbi Brown. Her latest hit product, Jones Road: the Lip Pencil is billed as “your lips, but better.” Several shades sold out within its first few weeks. “Traditional liners were formulated with colors that didn’t actually match natural lip tones—they were too red, orange, or yellow. I also found most to be drying, leading to creasing and lines.” She advises customers to sketch on their pencil in the same way that her concealer crayons should be scribbled.
This is not the garish, contrasting lip liner of Gen X’s experimental teens, nor the studied, contoured take of the Kardashian sisterhood. Instead, imagine a naturalistic, augmenting gesture that feels modern and modish. I first became aware of this approach via Black friends in the early aughts, who would line without adding color to reveal the beauty of their God-given kissers. Now everyone’s at it, as a form of subtle, enhancing definition that speaks of insouciant ease.
Super-natural liner has had its moments in the past. Linda, Christie, Naomi, and company wouldn’t get out of bed without MAC Spice Lip Pencil. Charlotte Tilbury’s peachy-pink Pillowtalk Lip Cheat spawned a spin-off range to suit all complexions.
But rarely has lip pencil looked so milkmaid fresh. Millennial-crush Glossier has served the samey pinks and browns claimed to “suit everyone,” and thus no one. Instead, it has launched eight “true-to-lip” enhancers, featuring a palette of warm and cool tones. To find your you-do-you pencil, deploy the old makeup-artist hack of determining your shade via your nipple color.
Makeup artist Lisa Eldridge has tetrachromacy, a genetic mutation allowing her to perceive more colors than the rest of us. She has put this superpower to public service in her new, soft-focus Sculpt and Shade Lip Pencils, which were inspired by the skin’s undertones.
“When I look at a face, I see greens, blues, and purples to yellows, reds, and pinks—almost like a mosaic,” she explains. “Over the years, I found that lip pencils, like foundations, were too basic and simplistic, leaning too pink-and-red, or too yellow. The goal with my shades was to nail that complexity.”
Ilia’s Lip Sketch Hydrating Crayon is the advertisement currently cropping up most on my Instagram feed. It’s a pencil-lipstick hybrid combining precision with creamy, weightless color, and setting for durability. Not only does it lend definition, fullness, and volume, it also hydrates, plumps, and smoothes.
And that’s the real joy of this accentuated, yet beguilingly undone mouth. Younger women may have fallen for low-key liner. However, it’s the over-40 women who have most to gain, the lips pursing, puckering, and deflating with age. Nourishing color not only exaggerates the natural line, it protects its fragile border from erosion. It’s not quite as transformative as lip filler, but it’s not as permanent or potentially problematic, either.
The effect is so natural that a fair few chaps have taken to indulging. Combine with a faint “milk stain” (a white, beige-y pink, or tan outer line), plus an above-Cupid’s-bow highlight, for the full Tess of the d’Urbervilles pout.
Hannah Betts is a features writer and columnist at The Times of London and The Daily Telegraph
