As you can tell from the sheer quantity of reviews on this blog, I’m a total lip product person. I like lipstick, lip balm, lip tints, and I’m even warming up to lip gloss. So I’m constantly on a search for things that are more impressive, or better colors, than what I’ve already got at home. A while back Tracy over at Fanserviced made an Instagram post about a product from the Kiss Button Lips Red Edition holiday line, endorsed by k-pop band Shinee, called the Illuminator. I bought it, tried it out, reviewed it, and liked it enough that I thought it was worth purchasing one or two more colors, so I got one matte shade and three regular shades. Then I bought another matte shade. Then I bought two of the Red Edition red colors. This is like a never-ending thing for me, guys.
In any case, I ended up with an impressive collection of products from this line. Here they are, lined up all prettily:
And here are arm swatches of them.
If you noticed that regular edition #5 Sweet Candy and Matte edition #2 Confident Charm look really similar, you’re right! Only I need them both. Because reasons. (Seriously, though, the matte edition is…well…matte.)
Here they are on the lips.
The Kiss Button Matte are, obviously, matte. They go on incredibly smoothly without any tugging or pulling at all, and they feel really comfortable on the lips, which I find to be fairly surprising for matte lip products – they either aren’t totally matte or they’re horribly drying in my experience. These manage to avoid both of those issues. I can get maybe 5 hours of wear out of these products (keeping in mind that I tend to talk a lot and lick my lips, so if you aren’t that sort of person your lip color will likely last longer). They do fade to leave a stain as well, and they fade fairly attractively.
The regular edition is, as you may have guessed, not matte. They are just as nice on the lips as the matte edition, but they are both a little more moisturizing and a little less opaque. The color is still vivid, but it’s a step down from the matte edition. Here we hit the age-old tradeoff in lip products: the more moisturizing the product is, the shorter the wear time. The Kiss Button Lip colors in the regular edition last me a good 3 or 4 hours or so before they wear off, so it’s not that their wear time is bad, per se, it’s just not as good as the matte editions.
Then, of course, we come to the red edition. This was a holiday line that included three red shades and the gold illuminator, which I already reviewed on the blog so I’m not going to mention it here. The red edition formula is pretty much exactly the same as the regular Kiss Button Lips formula. The only difference is that, other than the illuminator, every color in the red edition is some shade of red. (They really went for the obvious naming conventions for the different editions here.) #1 Twenty Red is a pink red, and #2 Red Siren is a yellow red.
There are two other editions of the Kiss Button Lips, the Kiss Button Lips Pop and the Rose Edition. I don’t have anything from either of those lines (although they’re on my list of things to look at), so that’s a matter for another post.
Anyway, long story short, the Kiss Button Lips have become one of my go-to lip color products, especially the Matte Edition colors. They’re a bit bright for work but I can often be found wearing them on the weekend.
The regular type and Matte Edition can be found on KoreaDepart for about $7 and BeautyNetKorea for about $8. The Red Edition are harder to find, as they were limited edition, and I could only get hold of them on Kpoptown for about $10.