Are lip stains making a comeback?? I sure hope so! Mary Kay has launched their Lip Tints for Spring 2019, and I was so excited to try them out.

I used to love the ease of a lip stain (back when they were more readily accessible) – it feels weightless on your lips and yet adds a bunch of colour that seems to last forever. Mary Kay has released three limited edition shades that contain 0.08 oz/2.5g of product for $18 USD or $21 CAD.

The water-based lip tints are inspired by desert hues and smell of vanilla (honestly, I get more of a butterscotch smell which is really delicious). They claim to have buildable colour and a lightweight feel.

They might be buildable, but right out of the gate you can see that there is intense colour pigmentation in a swatch! The shades are really beautiful and I experienced very little feathering even in a swatch (which is impressive given that most lip stains in a pen format tend to bleed out intensely into the crevices of my skin).

Unfortunately, the story changes a little when you get these shades on the lips.

Canyon Coral is the palest of all three shades, and yet still vividly bright. I found that I did have to swipe on two layers to try to get an even coat, but even then I was left with some patches on my lip where the colour wouldn’t adhere very well. Lip stains have a tendency to cling to dry sections of your lips (so for me that’s usually the perimeter) and that became pretty obvious with this one. Even after I had let the product dry for 3-5 minutes, I pressed my lips together and the colour lifted from a large chunk of the inner rim of my mouth. I tried re-applying it, but it just wouldn’t stick on that area. Plus you can also see that it looks kinda patchy on my upper lip. The colour itself is gorgeous, but I found the application and staying power too finicky on this shade.

Desert Flora was slightly better, but again you can see the weird translucency in parts of my lip, but not everywhere. Sadly, the darker the shade, the more you’ll see lighter patches of your skin coming through. Unfortunately, I found that as soon as I licked my lips, most of the colour disappeared, even after I’d let it dry for quite a while.

Oh boy… I’ll be honest, after the last two shades I didn’t even want to try Magenta Mirage out as my previous experiences had been seriously unfortunate. But I figured maybe this would be the BEST one. Yeah… nope. The colour itself is beautiful.. but you can see it clinging for dear life to a patch of skin on my bottom lip (that doesn’t even FEEL dry to me by the way). Sadly, the worst part was that I put this lip colour on after I’d done my makeup, let it dry while I did my hair, took the picture you see above… licked my lips slightly… AND:

The colour got all over my dang tongue. I was so annoyed. Not only had I lifted most of the colour off of my lips, but now I also had a stained tongue. (And it stained for HOURS by the way… through a coffee and a bottle of water, even after I’d blotted my tongue with a paper towel.)

Final Thoughts

I can’t recommend these at all. I was so excited to use them because I used to love the Revlon Lipstains + Balm (and only just realized they’ve long since been discontinued), but these Mary Kay Lip Tints annoyed the crap out of me. The colour payoff was inconsistent on my lips, the colour mostly came off at the faintest sign of wetness (the inner rim of my lips, my tongue, even a straw), and they stained my freaking tongue. Even when they left behind a mediocre stain (like… 30% of what you see in the lip swatch photos above), it was mostly as a rim around my lips! So it looked like I had applied lip liner and nothing else.

I’m actually really sad about this… I wanted to wear Canyon Coral all summer long and now I want nothing to do with these. 🙁

The products featured in this post were sent to me for consideration.