Yummy lip balm and gloss start with CoverGirl's Clean Fresh Yummy Gloss, plus balms from Kayali, Kulfi and Sincerely Yours. I also go through Lancôme's Juicy Tubes and YSL's Candy Glaze stick, from sheer and fruity to high shine.
Yummy Lip Balm and Gloss: CoverGirl Clean Fresh and More
There was a season, around 2000, when a lip gloss was something you smelled before you saw it. Lancôme's Juicy Tubes arrived in 2000 in ten shades, and the brand says it sold twenty tubes a minute in the United States at the peak. That thread runs through this yummy lip gloss edit. CoverGirl's Clean Fresh Yummy Gloss, the hero of grid one, is the mass-market heir: a sheer lip gloss with hyaluronic acid and antioxidants, in berry, coconut and pineapple scents, with shade names like My Strawbooty and Let's Get Fizzical that read like inside jokes. CoverGirl itself began in 1961 as a medicated makeup line from the Noxzema Chemical Company, which is a funny ancestor for a pineapple gloss. Around it I pulled brands that each started from a different itch: a fragrance house, a founder who was not allowed makeup as a child, a Korean label that calls itself gender-neutral. Begin with the first four, and give each one a sniff before you decide.
Loosening up the format
Grid two loosens up the format. Sugar Poppy finishes the CoverGirl run, and Honey, I Glow moves to a Big Oil Stick that melts on with a sheer tint and a blend of jojoba, avocado and cold-pressed blueberry seed oil. It is the tidy option for a bag. Sincerely Yours calls Sugarcoat a gloss-balm, with shea butter and a barrier-minded mix of encapsulated hyaluronic acid, niacinamide and ceramides under a candy-coated shine. Kayali is the outlier. Mona Kattan founded it in 2018 drawing on Middle Eastern scent layering, and the name means my imagination in Arabic. Its Yum Cashmere Kiss is a pink tinted balm with a pillowy silicone applicator, and for anyone who wants a scented lip gloss that behaves like a balm, it is the one. The scent family is warm and gourmand. Try this: swipe each shine on the back of your hand and wait a minute. The scent that survives that minute is the one you will actually notice on your mouth.
Snacks, serums and a Y2K return
Grid three is the high-shine end. Kulfi's Priyanka Ganjoo launched in February 2021 with a single product, a kajal, and named the brand as an ode to the little girl who was not allowed to wear makeup. The Lip Snack scents come from birthdays at home, cake and cups of chai, and Watermelon Sherbet is a light pink with a watermelon scent. Laka started in South Korea in 2018 and calls itself the country's first gender-neutral beauty brand. Its Fruity Lip Glotioner is a peptide and raspberry seed oil gloss serum in a fig shade, the kind of my-lips-but-better color. Juicy Tubes, here in a warm milky brown, was discontinued in 2018 and came back in 2020 for its twentieth anniversary. Yves Saint Laurent describes Candy Glaze as the first lip gloss stick on the market, and it dispenses in six clicks of the base. What I would skip is reapplying gloss over gloss every hour. It collects crumbs and turns tacky, so blot once and add a small dot in the center of the lower lip.
Sweet, then sensible
I keep coming back to how many of these began as a feeling first and a formula second. A Y2K tube, a birthday cake, a fragrance layered at night, a stick that clicks. The sweetness is the hook, but the good ones also leave lips comfortable an hour later. Pick the smell you would be happy to catch on your own sleeve, then wear it on a day with nothing to prove. If you want to keep browsing, I also put together Tarte Lip Gloss and the Maracuja Juicy Lip Lineup and Lip Gloss Wonderland.
