Red Lips and Rosewater: M&S Downton Abbey Lip Gloss Trio

Hello all!

I've been absent for a while because I'm currently in Ireland attending a conference. However, I picked up a small beauty purchase yesterday and decided I would attempt to blog about it from my hotel room.

I ran into Marks & Spencer to pick up a few things upon my arrival to Ireland and came across the Marks and Spencer for Downton Abbey Lip Gloss Trio. It looked like a set of lovely colours for the reasonable price of €13.00, the packaging was quite pretty, and I'm a sucker for anything Downton related, so I had to have it.

The trio includes three full-sized glosses in Claret (red), Precious (Gold), and Velvet (mauve).


Left to Right, Claret, Precious, Velvet

The first thing I noticed about these lip glosses when I opened the package and tried them out was the brush. It is truly the weirdest and worst applicator. It's a strange, pointed spike of a brush that applies minimal product and takes precision and a mirror. Points off right away.

The odd pointed brush

When I swatched the glosses, they seemed less promising than their packaging suggested. Claret was a sheer strawberry red, Precious was a gold flecked nude, and Velvet was a dusty rose. The pigmentation in the swatch was medium, but there was still a discernable difference in colour between the three shades.

Bottom to top: Velvet, Precious, Claret

And then, I tried them on. And it was all downhill from there. While the formula was moisturizing and completely non-sticky, the three glosses were luckluster. Precious was barely visible, and didn't even have enough shine to merit its use as a sheer gloss. Claret and Velvet were virtually identical.