Essence Lipstick in Red Carpet - Spring Time Coral Red

Red lips might seems intimidating but you can always chicken out by doing a little bit of tweaking here or there: Lowering the intensity helps, so does warming up/cooling it down (making it looks less "primary"). In this case, Essence is being rather approachable with its sheer, slightly glossy formula and a lean towards coral.

Essence Lipstick Red Carpet is a medium coral red with soft texture and a play-don scent.The packaging is light and (way too) easy to twist up so you might accidentally squash the lipstick against the lid when you are just twisting it up. For the drugstore lipstick, it's creamy and moist enough to glide but doesn't stay that way on lips.

On my lips, Essence Red Carpet just happens sink in and drain my lips from moisture(Boo!).One of the main reason I use lip products is that they keep my lips protected and moist so apply a lipstick like this is like pay someone ($2.5 is still money!) to beat me up...

Of course, lip gloss (this is Sally Hansen Lipnotic Gem Gloss) always saves the day in circumstances like this, when you look beyond the draining formula (a hard task for me), Essence actually did a fairly good job formulating the shade(I will call it Spring Break instead of Red Carpet though): It's bright and juicy, it gives a glow on the face without drawing too much attention...

Overall: I hate to say this but here it goes...What do you expect, it's $2.5 after all. Let's hope our week-long journey of red lipstick will be a little more pleasing after the not-so-great start. (Did I tell you that I am doing a Red Lips series this week? Well, I guess I am now.)