LIPSTICK COFFEE BUZZ WET N WILD SERIES
LIPSTICK COFFEE BUZZ WET N WILD MAC

(Unless your dream product is truly inaccessible, geographically or financially or otherwise.) My favorite drugstore cosmetics are the ones I bought because I thought they were special, not because I thought they were similar to more expensive products. My Candy Yum-Yum experience has taught me a cardinal rule of makeup addiction: never buy a beauty product unless you want it for itself and not as a substitute for another product.

LIPSTICK COFFEE BUZZ WET N WILD SERIES

If I want that lipstick, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t save up for it instead of seeking solace in a series of cheaper imitations. I’m a broke grad student who can’t afford a Chanel suit, but if I eat peanut-butter sandwiches for lunch for a few days, I can afford a Chanel lipstick. It’s made primarily for women who can’t buy designer clothes but want a piece of the brand anyway. Here’s the thing: Designer makeup isn’t made for women who have a whole wardrobe of designer clothes. You’ll buy that Wet n Wild dupe of Tom Ford Cherry Lush, feel dissatisfied, move on to a Maybelline dupe, still feel dissatisfied…Do you see where this is going? You’ll either amass five lackluster dupes and decide that one of them is good enough (even though it really isn’t), or you’ll buy the Tom Ford anyway and feel silly for all those drugstore indulgences. If you do, you’re probably a beauty junkie, in which case it may already be too late for you.

But she also doesn’t spend time Googling makeup dupes. The thought of doing so is laughable to her. My mother, for instance, has never spent more than $10 on a lipstick.

We all have our psychological cutoff points that may not tally with our actual purchasing power. What about that $50 Tom Ford lipstick? Isn’t it worth looking for a dupe for that? Sure–but only if you’re absolutely certain you’re not the kind of person who can spend $50 on a lipstick.

LIPSTICK COFFEE BUZZ WET N WILD MAC

Yes, you say, but MAC is a mid-range brand. If you want the real thing and it’s accessible to you, buying a dupe just won’t feel satisfying. And that, I think, is the problem with dupes. Instead of just spending $16 in the first place, I dropped an extra $5 on a lipstick that I stopped wearing after I bought Candy Yum-Yum. I bought a supposed dupe of Candy Yum-Yum and felt smug for a few days, but my desire for the real thing hadn’t been quelled, and I ended up splurging on the MAC anyway. But the pursuit of dupes can become a pastime in itself, not a means to an end. There are many reasons why we look for makeup dupes: because certain brands aren’t available to us, or we prefer to patronize cruelty-free brands, or we just don’t want to pay $50 for a Tom Ford lipstick. It took me a while to figure out what this meant, but once I did, I found that there was something addictive about dupe-hunting. When I first got into makeup, I noticed that whenever I typed the name of a product into Google, “ dupe” would pop up as a suggested search. There was more than one coffee shop! There were thrift stores! But I digress.įinally, as promised, a word about dupes. My own school was a 35-minute bus ride away, in the middle of nowhere, and tiny, tranquil Northampton felt like a bustling metropolis by comparison. (I had a coupon.) I have a great fondness for that particular CVS, since I went there so often in college for things like cranberry body wash and jars of peanut butter. So at the end of a chilly March, in a CVS in Northampton, MA, I scored Fuchsia Flash for something like $5. The Vivids were shiny instead of matte, but since I wasn’t as passionate about mattes as I am today, I figured that the finish couldn’t make that much difference. Of the eight Vivids, Fuchsia Flash may have caused the greatest online buzz, as many bloggers swore up and down that it was a perfect color match for Candy Yum-Yum. So it wasn’t until the spring of 2013, when MAC made Candy Yum-Yum permanent, that I began to have serious thoughts about buying it.īut that was also the season when Maybelline released its Vivids line of brightly colored lipsticks. I also dislike buying limited-edition products, for fear that I’ll fall in love with them and think melancholy thoughts about the transience of earthly things every time I use them. I’d never had a chance to swatch the lipstick in person, and I felt wary about ordering such a loud color sight unseen. MAC resurrected it briefly in August 2012, but once again, I hesitated too long and missed my chance. So I missed out on Candy Yum-Yum the first time around. A wide-eyed novice in the world of makeup geekery, I didn’t understand that I couldn’t just order a limited-edition lipstick from the MAC website a whole entire week after the collection launched.

Lipstick coffee buzz wet n wild