Lip plumper

A lip plumper is a gloss with a job beyond shine. The base is the same as any gloss, oils and thickeners that stay wet on the lip, and to it the maker adds something the lips can feel. The listings name the ingredients openly: Maybelline’s for Lifter Plump names chilli pepper, NYX’s for Duck Plump names spicy ginger, and others describe a cooling effect instead. What the wearer notices first is the sensation, which makers describe in terms ranging from a “comfortable, tantalizing tingle” to a “warming-cooling tingle” to plain cooling.

Many plumpers now carry a second, slower route as well: peptides or hyaluronic acid, sold on claims measured in weeks rather than minutes. Those are the makers’ claims, and this page repeats them only as such. Against its neighbours, a plumper is a gloss first. It has the same shine and the same habit of wearing off with eating and talking, and a plain gloss worn on the centre of the lips catches the light in much the same way.

Start with the sensation you are willing to wear, because it is the thing plumpers differ on most. The spicier formulas, the ones that name pepper or ginger or sell themselves as extra strength, are built to be felt: Too Faced says its Maximum Plump is “not for plumping rookies”. The cooling ones are gentler in feel, if not always in claim. Makers describe their formulas plainly enough to go by, and if a label promises intensity, it is wise to believe it.

Then choose as you would any gloss. A clear plumper goes over any lipstick without changing its colour; a tinted one does the work of two products; shimmer and glitter hide texture that a mirror shine would show. Stickiness varies as it does with gloss, and the oil-infused formulas feel lightest. If you already own a gloss you like, the plumping version of a familiar range is the easiest way to find out whether you enjoy the sensation at all.

Plumper labels mix three sorts of ingredient, and it helps to tell them apart. The first are the ones you feel, which makers name because the sensation is part of what they sell: chilli pepper, ginger and cooling agents. The second are the ones sold on slower claims: peptides, sometimes under trade names such as Maxi-Lip, and hyaluronic acid. The third are the ordinary ingredients of any gloss, the oils, thickeners and pigments that make up most of the tube and give it its shine and colour.

A percentage or a clinical figure printed on the box is the maker’s own figure, and worth reading as that. What no label can tell you is how a formula will feel on your own lips. A tester tried with a clean disposable wand tells you more in a minute than any description, and the plumpers that feel pleasant are the ones people keep wearing.

Apply a plumper to smooth, bare lips and keep it inside the lip line, away from the thinner skin around the mouth; the sensation is meant for the lips, not the skin beside them. Leave it off lips that are chapped or cracked. Worn under lipstick it adds slip; worn over lipstick it turns the finish to gloss, and the clear versions do so without shifting the colour.

For the fullest-looking result, concentrate the gloss on the centre of the upper and lower lip, where light falls first, and line the edge with a pencil close to your own lip colour. If a formula stings rather than tingles, or the skin around the mouth reddens, wipe it off and switch to a cooling formula or a plain gloss. Like any gloss, it is best kept to yourself: the wand goes back into the tube after every use.

The name is older than the gloss. In dentistry a lip plumper is a prosthesis worn inside the mouth to restore the contour and support of the lip. A paper under that title appeared in a dental journal in 1952,^[1] and the term was still in clinical use in 2004, for a device made after surgery to the jaw.^[2]

The cosmetic plumper is recent, and its record is mostly commercial. By the middle of the 2000s it was established enough to appear in a rival’s patent: an application filed in October 2005 and assigned to Revlon said that cosmetics products for plumping lips “have been launched”, and gave as an example Lip Injection, the name still carried by Too Faced’s plumping glosses, describing it as a gloss whose active ingredients were spices with “a slightly irritating effect”.^[3] The same application described a second approach, a collagen peptide said to work over a period of weeks, and added that “It has been reported that the before and after effect after thirty days of treatment is difficult to see visually.”^[3]

That is one competitor’s account of other companies’ products, and it is quoted here for the two methods it names rather than as a verdict on either. Both are still on sale twenty years on, the spice and the peptide, and many of the glosses below carry them together in the same tube.