Beauty Dish

Review: Beyond Color Lip Plumping Conditioner with Retinol

Birdie's Formal Review of Avon Beyond Color Plumping Lip Conditioner with Retinol SPF 15

The tagline for Avon's Beyond Color collection is "Makeup Enriched With The Advantage Of Skin Care." The theory here is that these makeup products will not only give you a glowing, colorful new look, but they will shrink your pores, smooth your skin, and take years off your age. Currently Avon offers several products in the Beyond Color line: lipsticks and lip liners, colored mascaras, concealer, and a rainbow of anti-aging cream eyeshadows.

I've been using the Beyond Color Plumping Lip Conditioner with Retinol for two weeks. Avon promises 35% fuller lips and reduced lip lines, but the promo literature doesn't specify how long you need to use this product to see such incredible results and whether the results are permanent.

As usual, I'm going to be frank. My lips are neither thin nor lusciously plump. I never use a lip liner - I know, I should - and until becoming an Avon rep I rarely wore lipstick at all. I'm more of a gloss and chapstick sort of girl. I'm not sure I want bee-stung lips like Courtney Love or Meg Ryan.

The Plumping Lip Conditioner comes in an elegant cream-colored case with shiny silver accents. The Plumping Lipsticks come in a similar case. They have a substantial feel. When you pick one up, it feels rich, expensive, and high class, like a lipstick you'd buy at a department store beauty counter. The regular price is eight bucks a pop, but sometimes Avon runs a special. The campaign before last you could mix or match two different colors or a color and the condition for $9.99.

I decided to begin with the Plumping Lip Conditioner. You can wear this alone or under lipstick. The conditioner is applied just like lipstick. It looks like a lipstick too, a pale, shiny off-white lipstick with no detectable odor. I applied it over naked lips. The first application I stood still for a moment to feel any strange vibrations or tingling as some customers have reported. But it felt like lipstick, smooth and creamy, a bit sticky to the touch.

If you wear the Plumping Lip Conditioner alone, it's invisible, like using a lip balm. Your lips look smoother and richer, due to the high moisture content in the conditioner. This effect is not lasting. Once the conditioner wears off, your lips look less hydrated.

I tried applying a variety of different lipsticks and glosses on top of the Plumping Lip Conditioner over the past two weeks. I had good success with some, and some sorry messes with others. Some Avon lipsticks and glosses will clump a bit on top of the conditioner, leaving streaky blotches. Other lipsticks, most notably the Beyond Color lipstick series and the Avon beComing line, glide on effortlessly and look fabulous.

It's hard to say exactly how much plumper my lips became during use. It certainly wasn't 35%, more like ten or twenty percent, tops. The effect seems to wear off by the time the lipstick is removed or wears off during the day. But when you first apply the product and for a few hours afterward, you have Hollywood lips! Watch out Angelina Jolie!

Since the Plumping Lip Conditioner contains retinol, I am guessing that given some time, more of these small effects will be more permanent. I will continue to use the Beyond Color products and will continue to report my experiences.

Edited to add that out of ten stars, I would give this product a 5. It wasn't terrible, just terribly mediocre.

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