Forget Blotting—Learn the Real Trick to Red Lipstick That Stays Put!

You know when you do a bold red lip perfectly, walk out the door feeling hella fine, and then sip a coffee an hour later and immediately feel your perfect red lip starting to slip? Arrrrgh. There are ways to combat this loss-of-perfect color, of course. You probably know all the standard tricks.

You can buy lipstick that says it stays on “for up to 14 hours!” (and then feel the weird dryness and crackling effect of a lipstick that can, um, stay on for 14 hours). You can apply a lip-locking potion over your regular lipstick. You can only drink through straws.

OR: You can forget all these problems and apply lipstick MY way.

I have a lipstick secret, and I’ve been teaching it to my friends for about a year now. If you don’t know it already, it is literally so easy you will be annoyed. Here is how you get your perfect red lipstick to STAY THE HELL ON FOR ACTUAL HOURS:

STEP 1: Here is the secret (it’s first!)—line your lips and fill them in completely with a bright red lip stain. Let it dry. Do it again. Yes! The stain must be a true stain, not a gloss or anything gel-like. You could try Too Faced Melted Long Wear Liquified Lipstickand blot the gloss off the top to keep the stain part. It must soak directly into your lips for this to work, as if you’d colored them in with a Sharpie. You need a brilliant red base for your lipstick—that way, once your lipstick wears off, you’ll be like “Oh, no worries, it just so happens I have these BACK-UP RED LIPS.”

STEP 2: Moving onto the technique my mother and Kevyn Aucoin preached about: Line your lips with either a lip liner that matches your red lipstick or with a lip brush, using your lipstick as liner.

STEP 3: Fill in your lips completely.

STEP 4: Fold a piece of toilet paper in half and blot. (Kevyn said to use only 1-ply toilet paper, but I haven’t found it makes a difference.)

STEP 5: Forget dusting face powder delicately over a tissue like I’ve seen in a lot of makeup articles lately; we want our lipstick to last forever, and so we’re going to dust face powder directly on our lips. Dust ‘em good!

STEP 6: Re-apply both your liner and lipstick.

STEP 7: Blot again.

STEP 8: Now you have brilliant red lips that stay put for hours, and they don’t even kiss off (if you’re kissing lightly!)

So, to recap: RED LIP STAIN, lipstick and liner, powder, and another layer of lipstick and liner. When all the lipstick wears off...POOF! you still have red lips! This would also work for deeper colors. Now get out there and enjoy your day with lips that look the way you want ‘em to!