A beautiful natural lipgloss

With baited breath I waited for my set of Organic Hydra Glosses to arrive in the mail. Are they going to be everything I want in a natural lip gloss, or am I going to be disappointed like I have been with so many of the others? I open the package greedily and just about split a nail trying to get those perforated, individually-sealed-for-your-own-good plastic encasements off each one. It’s like Christmas, if you substitute the reindeer for a mailtruck. But it was worth all the effort and anticipation; my lipgloss prayers are answered in 9 beautiful colors. Admittedly, it’s not the only great natural lipgloss currently on the market, but I already know and love (read: trust) this company so I wanted a great gloss from them.

It’s all about the gloss and the glide

When I go shopping for a lipgloss I’m primarily concerned with one question: is it glossy enough? Let me tell you, there are plenty of lip glosses on the market that fulfill this requirement. But when you add the word “natural” as a descriptor for that item, well, it just ain’t so. At least if you really mean natural. Most of the truly natural glosses fall short on wearability, and most of the truly wearable glosses fall short on natural. Take the earlier version of Afterglow‘s lipgloss as an example; it just didn’t gloss. In fact, it was more like a liquid lipstick. A good lipgloss needs to be:

1. glossy  (the gloss factor)
2. keep your lips soft and smooth without having to constantly reapply  (the glide factor)

Anything else is up for interpretation. Lipgloss is the Dance of the Seven Veils of the makeup world; if it’s good you’ll find John the Baptist’s head on my plate in the morning. In other words: deadly (and necessary, as many of us won’t leave the house without it). However, we don’t want to take that statement literally. We don’t want our lip glosses to be deadly to us or to the environment.

But you can’t just gloss over the details

So, you have to read the labels carefully. For instance, when you read this word on your lipgloss label put it down and turn around slowly:

Scientific Facts:

Polybutene and polyisobutylene are liquid oligomers widely used as plasticizers for high-molecular weight polymers, such as polyethylene.  ~ Wikipedia

Polybutene is the polymer formed by the polymerization of a mixture of isobutenes and normal butenes. The viscosity of Polybutene increases in direct proportion to increasing chain length.  ~ cosmetiticsinfo.org

Polybutene is a synthetic petrochemical that increases the viscosity of the lipgloss to give it that high-shine long-wear you get from the less “natural” lipglosses. It’s a good thing that Afterglow‘s Organic Hydra Gloss uses no petrochemicals whatsoever; good for you and good for the environment. And the company participates in the Whole Foods Gimme5 Recycling Program. It may not be the glossiest in the room, or the most long-wearing, but I’ll take it any day over those less natural.

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Note: elephantjournal.com received this [review item] for free, in return for a guarantee that we would review said offering.  That said, we say what we want—good and bad, happy and sad.