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The first compliment I received at Vogue came thanks to a drugstore impulse purchase. It was 10 years ago, during my first days as a beauty assistant at our labyrinthine old 4 Times Square offices. As I made my way down a corridor known for star sightings (Julianne Moore once smiled at me there), I ran into a colleague, Chioma Nnadi, whom I’d heard editors describe as the most stylish person on the planet. “You always have the perfect lip color,” she said, and asked me what it was. Flattered, I told her about the chubby MoodMatcher pencil I picked up next to the cash register at Hudson Square Pharmacy downtown. On contact its color changed from a light blue to pink, after which I’d blot everything away, leaving only a cherry ice-pop stain that stayed all day. (Even now, MoodMatcher is billed as “the original color change lipstick” that “works with your chemistry to create a totally customized shade that’s truly your own.”)
I recently reminded Nnadi of this exchange, and she revealed that she still has the product somewhere—and so do I. Lately, however, newer “pH-matching” and “color-adaptive” formulas have launched with ingredients so good you can sleep in them, like Youthforia BYO Blush Oil, and textures so natural you don’t have to dab them, like the Rosy Lip Enhancer that Hermès Beauty creative director Gregoris Pyrpylis applied to models on the house’s spring runway. (As he puts it, one shade has the ability to “become one with the skin, just like the collection.”) But even before my 4 Times Square days, Dior Beauty was designing the inaugural Lip Glow “color awakening balm” of 2009. “It was the first time that the color-reviver technology was used in a more institutional product,” says Peter Philips, creative and image director of Christian Dior Makeup, noting that Dior’s general credibility made it feel less like “a gimmick.” (Years later I would wear Lip Glow to my wedding, doing my own makeup in my childhood bathroom.)
It’s 1:05 a.m. in New York when I finally hop on a call with Michelle Wong, the Sydney-based chemist and educator at Lab Muffin Beauty Science whose popular TikToks simplify industry-speak. “It sounds much cooler than it is,” she says of the “technology” behind pH-powered makeup. “As far as I know, most of the ones on the market use Red 27.” The colorless hero dye shifts to a sheer red tint above a pH 2.5, while another common ingredient, Red 21—the dye used in Lip Glow and Estée Lauder’s Pure Color Envy Color Replenish Lip Balm—goes from beige to reddish between pH 0 and 3. Red 27 also swaps what Wong calls “hiding power,” an ability to cover what’s underneath, for staying power. “In makeup, there are pigments and dyes,” she explains, likening the former to oil paints, the latter to watercolors. “Pigments are little, solid particles that have hiding power. So in regular lipsticks and eye shadows, you generally have pigments. But this is actually a transparent dye. It will sink into the skin and stain it a little bit.” The effect plays up whatever color already exists in your lips—or cheeks, if you like to wear it there. (When it comes to more sensitive areas like the eyelids, however, the use of Red 27 and Red 21 is not FDA-approved.)
Layering can customize the hue, an approach that Rihanna endorses. The Fenty Beauty founder added just one Match Stix Color-Adaptive Cheek + Lip Stick (in the shade Strawberry Pop) to her core collection. “I love its ease,” Rihanna tells me over email when I ask how she’s using it herself. She takes it “everywhere” and likes to swipe the balmy formula “on the apples of my cheeks, and even bring it up to the temples to give that really fresh wash of color, but with some drama”—drama that she can play up or down “with how many layers you apply.” After Fenty changed the industry with a 40-shade foundation range in 2017, a single product designed for everyone feels futuristic. “I’m all about beauty for all—creating options that really work for people and their skin tones, their skin types, their style,” Rihanna says. “What’s more beautiful than a color that becomes uniquely you?”
