Right. I’ve wanted to write this post for absolutely ages, but I know that very nude lip colours get quite a mixed response – they can be really difficult to wear, and therefore not everyone’s cup of tea. It requires (absolutely!) a dark, strong eye to balance out the paleness of the lips, and the consistency of the lip colour has to be spot on.

Despite these complications, the ‘nude-lip-dark-eye’ look is one that I get most often when I’m working, and so I feel as though I’d be hiding something from you if I didn’t do a post about MAC Fleshpot, which is an extremely nude lipstick from MAC, and one that has been used on me so many times. Nude-haters, look away now; this lipstick is more of a lip-eraser than a lip-colour!

To cut to the chase, I’ve put together a short video of me applying Fleshpot (bottom of page), so you can see for yourselves exactly how it turns out in the…er…Flesh. For those of you who prefer reading, and looking at pictures, I’ve made a little storyboard. Enjoy – or not, depending on which ‘Nude’ camp you’re in.

So, I’ve got a bit of a dark eye going on here; would be better if it was much darker, but this will do. (How lazy am I? It’s quite astounding!) I apply the lipstick straight from the tube (again, laziness).

This looks scary now, doesn’t it? Like I’m trying to rub out my lips! But patience, patience…

After applying, I spend a while patting and blending with my finger. This is the most important stage of applying this particular lipstick; it takes off excess product, blends the colour right into creases and corners of the mouth, and leaves a lovely matte finish. Without all this patting and blending, you’d get a thick-looking, weird, gross colour, like the colour of a plastic mannequin’s body.

See how the colour has gone softer? I want to say ‘chalkier’, but that’s not an attractive word…it’s just more muted, and more user-friendly. I don’t find that this lipstick is particularly drying, but if you wanted you could put a clear balm over the top – nothing shiny, I like this as a matte look!

As already mentioned, it’s not an easy look to wear – for a start, every time you eat or drink, your darker natural lip-colour will start showing through where the nude has worn off. Even more of a maintenance problem than wearing a dark colour! But the world of the fashion shoot is a crazy one, one in which ‘eating’ and ‘drinking’ are foreign words and makeup is touched up every ten seconds…

MAC Satin Lipstick in ‘Fleshpot’, only from MAC Pro.

***OH! I had to remove the video as I had blatantly used a very famous piece of music as the soundtrack and Youtube got cross! Sorry… It was a goodun’!***