Lip palette

A lip palette holds lipstick without the stick: cream lip colour poured or pressed into shallow pans, several to a case, to be picked up with a brush. The formula is close to a bullet lipstick’s, often a little softer, because it never has to stand up on its own. What changes is the way you use it. A palette is for mixing — a deeper shade to warm a nude, a touch of a bright to lift a brown — and for placing colour exactly, which a brush does better than a bullet.

It is also the working form of lipstick for professionals. A makeup artist making up many faces in a day takes colour from a palette with a clean brush, or a disposable one, for each person, rather than putting one stick on many mouths, and mixes the shade each face needs instead of carrying hundreds of lipsticks. For anyone else, a palette is the most compact way to carry more than one colour, and an economical way to own a range of them.

Mix on the back of the hand or a clean mixing plate rather than in the pans, so the colours in the palette stay clean. Pick up a little of the base shade, add the second colour a touch at a time, and blend with small circles until there are no streaks. Lighten with a pale nude rather than white, which turns colours chalky; deepen with a brown rather than black, which greys them. Warm a shade with orange or coral; cool it with a blue-based pink or a berry.

The same few moves correct shades you already own. A red that pulls too orange on your lips is cooled with a touch of berry; a nude that makes you look washed out is warmed with a little rose. When you find a mix you like, note roughly how much of each went in: two parts to one is easier to repeat than a guess.

A lip brush is small, flat and fairly firm, often with a slightly tapered or rounded tip. Load it lightly and draw the outline first — the cupid’s bow, the centre of the lower lip, then out to each corner — and fill in with the flat of the brush, pressing colour into the lines of the lips. Blot with a tissue and apply a second thin layer: blotting lifts the oil and leaves the colour, so two thin coats outlast one heavy one. For a softer, stained look, press colour into the centre of the lips with a fingertip and blend outward.

Keep it clean. Wipe the brush between shades and wash it with mild soap and water regularly. If a pan has been touched by someone else’s brush or lips, scrape a thin layer off the top with a clean spatula before you use it. Closed and kept cool, out of the sun, a cream palette keeps about as well as a lipstick.

Look first at the finish. Professional palettes are usually semi-matte and long-wearing, made to be mixed and to hold up under lights; palettes sold to everyday wearers lean creamier. Then look at the range. A handful of well-chosen shades — a nude close to your own lips, a red, a berry, a brown and a pale shade to lighten with — mixes into far more colours than it holds. Check that the pans are wide enough to work a brush in, that the case closes firmly, and whether single shades can be replaced when they run out.

A palette can also be made. Slice a thin piece from each of a few favourite lipsticks with a clean spatula, press each into a pan of an empty palette, and warm it for a few seconds with a hairdryer so it settles flat. Label the pans: lipsticks look alike once they are out of their cases.

Putting colour on the lips with a brush is far older than the stick. In Japan, beni — red extracted from safflower — was brushed from the inside of a small porcelain cup, the beni-choko, and many women still used it that way after Western cosmetics arrived; the Museum of Beni, which is run by the beni maker Isehan-honten, dates the first Japanese stick lipstick to 1917.^[1] In Europe and America, nineteenth-century lip colour was sold as tinted salves and pastes, and as liquid rouges. One argument for the stick, when it came, was that it did not spill like a liquid or leave the messy fingers of a paste.^[2]

The brush came back with a technique rather than a product. After 1945, the Museum of Beni records, Japanese magazines introduced a method described as popular in the United States — draw the outline of the lips with a lip brush, fill it with colour, blot with a tissue — and it changed how Japanese women wore lip colour.^[1] The paint box as a model belongs to the 1960s: Mary Quant, whose cosmetics were launched on 28 March 1966, said she had experimented with artists’ materials, water-colour paint boxes and brushes among them.^[3] The lip palette as a product has no inventor we can name, and its own record is thin. It is best understood as those three habits — the cup, the brush and the paint box — brought together in one flat case.