Zoya Hot Lips

OK first of all, this is not a makeup blog, and I don’t really want to make posts about non-polish related stuff, but I figure this is…sort of polish-adjacent because these glosses came from Zoya, and plus there don’t seem to be all that many Hot Lips swatches floating around on the net, so I figure I’ll contribute.

In the free Hot Lips promotion recently, I got Visa, Luck, and Shimmer.

So, Shimmer is less sheer than I had thought it would be. It’s a tad bit lighter than my natural lips, and pretty sparkly. The glitter in this isn’t gritty or annoying, but it’s definitely there. Shimmer smells like raspberries.

Luck is my favorite – it’s just slightly darker than my lips, and also very glittery. This one was the oddball of the bunch – it smells different (like bubblegum!) and it had a different applicator shape.

Visa I don’t really like. It’s surprisingly dark, and so I found it really difficult to apply evenly. Dark. DARK. A very nice color, but just not for me, maybe I”ll give it away. I tried to get gloss that was sort of out of my comfort zone since I tend to only wear makeup that exactly matches my face, but this one’s just too dark for me. A normal person would probably love it though. No shimmer in this one, and it also smells like raspberries.

So, the applicators. Luck was weirdly the only one with a “normal” rounded lip gloss top, the other two were just straight squeeze tubes – not really convenient for applying gloss directly to your lips, since I consider gloss more of a “shove it in your pocket and maybe apply a few times throughout the day without a mirror” kind of thing than an “apply with a makeup brush and a mirror” thing.

I like the shape of the tubes – they’re short and fat rather than inconveniently long and thin – good for the aforementioned shoving in pockets! Overall, these are very nice glosses. Not too sticky, huge range of colors, non-gritty glitter, the lip-lasting time was about what you’d expect for a gloss – reapply often and you’re fine.