As I approach the annual celebration of having orbited around the Sun on Earth, a painful bout with sciatica had me looking at my lip product stash. It has been quite some time since I bought a lip product, and after a quick urgent care visit for pain management (because sciatica will never go away), I found myself itching for a new lip product to feel a little better.

But alas, disposable income is a privilege afforded to the very few and I sure as hell wasn’t in that circle, so it was time to bust out my lip stash to talk myself out of buying lip products.

Spoiler alert: it failed. Lol. But I did learn something about myself: I have a very deep preference for berry and red shades, as they seem to work best with my skintone. And there was a particular lip product that stood out like a sore thumb: Colourpop’s Ultra Satin Bijou.

It was a bit of an impulse purchase, but it looked pretty on the screen. When I got it, it leaned towards my inner purple fanatic. But it wasn’t simply something I could wear for work, so it was reserved for the fun times.

And my brain had managed to convince itself that today qualified as a fun time. But you see, between the time I purchased Bijou and today was basically a whole eon, so the product did have a separation issue and it actually smelled like paint (I can’t recall for the life of me if it smelled that way when I first bought it).

So I applied it and thankfully, no bad reaction. What a relief!

But something started to nag at me when I looked at the mirror. The coverage was as good as Colourpop claimed for its Ultra Satin line, though I did apply a second coat for preference. I remember thinking that I could rock wearing the lip color before. So what was causing the nagging feeling?

A moment passes by and when I looked at how Bijou ultimately settled on my lips, I got my eureka moment: the color looked… unflattering. Perhaps the fact that I was pretty much barefaced did not help Bijou’s case? But the more I stared, the less I felt of that youthful confidence and I looked like I was having a really bad case of cyanosis. Yikes.

And so, I finally discovered the root of the nag. Even more surprising, I was more at ease with accepting the idea of chucking out Bijou, despite being barely used. I couldn’t imagine subjecting someone else to the painterly smell that emanates (apparently this is something that others have experienced with their Colourpop products) when opening the tube, but the biggest factor really was the color (me and my priorities. -_-).

And so, I bid adieu to the two tubes of Bijou that I have – thank you for being a brief moment of joy in my youth, but eventually I have to grow up and let go of some things along the way.