My sister in law just left town, and on our last lunch she made a confession. She had this lipstick she bought…20 YEARS AGO!!!!! And she finally realized maybe it wasn’t so great anymore when she put it on and it changed color. The thing she loved about the lipstick was the color, a shade that had been discontinued. The only reason she tossed it is because she realized that the product must have gone bad to the point where the color had actually changed. I hear this story a lot, women who find a color that they believe is some magical lip transformer, never to be found again, so they save it for years, parsing out usage. At least she saw that after 20 years the composition of the product had changed. But, it had probably gone bad much sooner than that. 20 years ago was 1990, my first year in Seattle…that was a long, long time ago. Many times a lipstick or gloss that old will smell rancid. Rancid oil on your lips, that sounds so horrible. Ladies, I know you believe you stumbled across some magic lip color, and now that it is discontinued you have been cheated out of the best make-up ever. Do you know how many lipstick companies there are? Do you know how many shades of lip color are out there? Most people can use up a lipstick in two years. If you are hoarding a lip color for special occasions, stop that! Every day is a special occasion. Wear your favorite things, don’t save them. Throw out that old crusty lipstick from the 1990′s, I know you can match that color!
