Lip gloss is making a comeback it seems, and Hard Candy is there to help you fill in the gaps in your collection (if you’ve been on a matte lip kick like I have, that is!) with their Plumping Serum Volumizing Lip Glosses.

I believe these Plumping Serum Glosses were recently repackaged but the formula remains the same. Hard Candy promises us “an outrageously shiny, volumizing, hydrating lip gloss that is formulated with [our] exclusive Plumping Serum System.” Thankfully, the plumping serum isn’t overly aggressive and I didn’t feel like my lips were being stung by bees (seriously – some lip plumping agents are horrible). You will feel a slightly cooling/tingling sensation on your lips while wearing these, but nothing extreme. Interestingly, these don’t smell like mint (I find a lot of plumping serums do) – these have more of a honey/caramel scent that is really, *really* appealing to me.

The tube contains 0.12 oz/3.55 ml of product and retails for approximately $6-7 USD/CAD. Hard Candy is available exclusively on their own web site as well as in stores at Walmart (USA & Canada). The wand is your typical doefoot applicator and you’ll find you need to dip back into the tube a few times to get full lip coverage.

While Hard Candy has a plethora of shades available (~20!), I tried three shades out that covered the range of the spectrum – a pale nude (First Kiss), a dark brown-red (Skin Deep) and a medium purple (Dirty Mind). The colours had roughly medium coverage in a swatch, although I’d venture to say the lighter shade was more opaque than the darkest one!

Hard Candy Plumping Serum Volumizing Lip Gloss Lip Swatches

First Kiss ended up  being my favourite shade out of the three I tried. It’s a bit on the milky side of things, so you will get a little bit of colour gathering where your lips crease, but I still loved how this one looked on me. It’s an easy to wear shade that I can grab on the go – love!

Dirty Mind really surprised me – in the tube it looks more like a grey-purple, whereas on the lips it’s much more of a purple with some pink it. Beautiful shade.

Skin Deep was the most problematic and I think it’s simply because of the colour of it. With any dark lip gloss shades I inevitably run into issues – the pigment slides around and won’t ever really stay “put” where I want it to. The colour is beautiful, but this would work best on top of a lipstick. Sadly, the packaging on this one actually broke on me after first use – the stopper stuck inside the cap and even when I re-inserted it back into the base it still popped out the next time I used it.

Final Thoughts

If you’re looking for an easy to wear lip gloss that has a little bit of plumping (but is honestly not *that* visibly apparent), then the Hard Candy Plumping Serum Volumizing Lip Glosses are a good pick. They’re comfortable to wear, have a lovely scent and are fairly inexpensive.

The pale to medium shades are definitely more my pick than the darker ones, but I will basically always say that about any lip gloss on the market simply because I find dark lip gloss pigment too difficult to work with (I said the same thing about the Bite French Press glosses). Now that might be a skin tone problem – I may fundamentally be too pale to wear shades like that and have them look good on the lips by themselves. (If you’re a darker complexion and wear deep lip gloss colours, please let me know how you feel about those kinds of shades – I’m super curious to know if you can wear them without a lipstick or lip liner underneath!)

The Hard Candy Plumping Serum Volumizing Lip Glosses can be purchased at walmart.ca for $6.98 CAD each or on walmart.com for $6 USD each.

The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration. Post contains affiliate links.