Lip oil

A lip oil is what a gloss would be without most of its thickeners. The base is oil, and the labels below name jojoba, cherry, hazelnut, prickly pear and honey-infused blends, mixed with lighter synthetic oils and esters and just enough polymer to stop the whole thing running. It spreads thinner than a gloss, feels slippery rather than tacky, and leaves a wet shine that looks less like a mirror and more like freshly licked lips. Some oils are clear, most carry a sheer tint, and a few are sold as pH-reactive: the colour develops on the lip, and the shade it settles into varies from one wearer to the next.

Its neighbours overlap. A gloss is thicker and stickier, and lasts longer for it; a balm is solid and made to soften rather than shine; a lip tint stains, where most oils only coat. The lines blur in the products themselves, with oil-gloss, oil-stain and lip-oil serum all on the labels below, but a lip oil proper is the thinnest and most slippery of the four, and the first to wear off.

Decide first between clear, tinted and colour-developing. A clear oil suits wear over lipstick, or alone for plain shine; a tinted one gives a wash of colour that most people can put on without a mirror; a pH-reactive oil is a small gamble on the shade you will end up with, which is part of its appeal. Then consider the feel. Thin oils disappear quickly and need reapplying through the day, while the thicker jelly oils, which sit between an oil and a gloss, last longer and look glossier.

Scent matters more than it seems in something worn under the nose. Many lip oils are flavoured or scented, often with fruit, and there are unscented choices for anyone who would rather not taste their makeup. The applicator changes the result as well: a large, flat doe-foot lays down a generous coat for shine, while a smaller one gives more control for a sheer tint. Glass bottles look handsome but weigh more in a bag; plastic tubes travel better.

Several oils here are sold as pH-reactive, and the phrase deserves a plain explanation. The colour comes from a dye that looks pale in the bottle and changes on contact with the lip, settling into a pink or rose that differs from one person to the next; makers call the result a custom or personal shade. Two things follow. The first swipe is a poor guide, so give it a minute or two before deciding whether you like the colour. And because the dye takes on the lip itself, these oils tend to leave a faint flush after the shine has worn away, which puts them somewhere between an oil and a tint. If you want the same predictable colour every time, choose an ordinary tinted oil; if a little surprise appeals, the pH shades are the ones to try.

Apply lip oil to clean lips, one stroke along each lip, and press them together. Because it is thin, it moves: if it tends to creep past the edge of your mouth, keep it just inside the line, or draw the line first with a nude or colourless pencil. Over lipstick, an oil softens a matte finish and adds shine, but it also loosens the lipstick underneath, so blot a long-wear formula and let it set before adding oil on top.

A clear oil works as a primer too: a thin coat, blotted, before a matte lipstick makes the lipstick more comfortable to wear. Like a gloss, a lip oil wand goes back into the bottle after touching the lips, so keep it to yourself and wipe the neck of the bottle now and then. Oils change as they age, and a stale or waxy smell is the sign that one has turned.

Oil on the lips is older than any product named for it. Some of the lip salves sold by chemists and made at home in the nineteenth century were little more than a coloured, scented oil. One recipe for a “scarlet lip salve” calls for an ounce of oil of sweet almonds, a drachm of fresh mutton suet and a little bruised alkanet root, simmered together, and suggests oil of jasmine, or of any other flower, in place of the almond oil when a scent was wanted.^[1] The alkanet gave the colour, and the suet thickened it.

The lip oil as a named category is recent. Clarins dates its Lip Comfort Oil to 2015 and calls it “the first lip oil on the market”. That is the company’s account of itself, and a hard one to test when oils have been sold for the lips for far longer than the name.^[2]

What can be measured is the demand. In 2024, according to the market-research firm Circana, lip was the top-performing makeup segment in the United States, up 19 per cent, driven by hybrid products “including lip oils and balms”.^[3] The appeal is the one the salve-makers understood: something that feels like care and looks like shine. The difference now is the range, from clear drugstore oils to couture ones that change colour on the lip.