10 Lip Tints For Darker Lip Tones I Swear By After Years Of Searching

When I die, please embalm me in Charlotte Tilbury products. Her makeup tends to look heavy handed when first applied, but after resting for a few minutes they always become absolutely ethereal — and the same goes for this pigmented lip balm. It settled and melted into my lips with a sheen and glamour that made me feel like a movie star from the '70s. There are 10 shades and they all have a natural finish that didn't clash with my undertones.

These are more of a gloss than an oil but I must include Innbeauty Project's Glaze because every single shade blew my mind. Even the shimmery ones (which I was wary about) made my lips look so supple. The oil catches the light in a way that emphasizes the pigment even though it's pretty sheer. My favorite is Glaze #1: It gives that just-finished-eating-a-popsicle hint of red.

Merit products are simple, natural-looking, and wonderfully effective. I'm completely smitten. The Shade Slick goes on like an oil but doesn't bleed all over the place, and you can layer it to build opacity — but even sheer it managed to show up as the exact color in the bottle on my brown lips. I'd buy all four shades.

The packaging of this lip tint is so beautiful it doubles as decor. There are three shades to pick from, but Night Venom is it. It's a true blue-red, which would normally make me look like a clown, but a very light application managed to gorgeously balance the brown and purple tones in my lips. It looked like I had just eaten raspberries off my fingertips.

This is the most hydrating product I've ever put on my lips (and also the one I am wearing in the above photo in the At Night shade). I applied it in the morning, and over the course of the day the oil went from a high sheen to a natural stain. There are only four shades plus a fifth clear option, but I stand by them all.

Tarte's Maracuja Juicy Lip smells like coconuts and makes me feel like I'm on a summer stroll in Central Park. The application is viscous and even, so all the pigment shows up even as the hydrating formula is slurped up by my dehydrated lips.

The Power Hour shade of this is the makeup equivalent of The Sisterhood of Traveling Pants. After trying it, I convinced several friends to buy it and it looks equally divine on everyone. Each shade of this product showed up on my lips, and it's very buildable so I took to blotting it for a blurred, lived-in effect.

Jones Road is Bobbi Brown's latest beauty venture, and her balms get an A+ in my book. They're so versatile that I smeared them on my lips, cheeks, and eyelids for a subtle monochrome look. The shades are deep and nuanced, but I particularly took to Tawny, a very '90s brown, which brought out my natural lip color (a feat that's been notoriously hard to do).

I am impartial to anything I can smear on my face with the dexterity of a toddler finger painting, so the multi-use of this product — and the fact that it's in a stick format — was already a win. The sticks are so pigmented that even the tiniest bit of product transformed the brown hue of my lips to a berry red.

INC.redible's multi-purpose tint stick is another wear-all-over MVP. It gives the perfect amount of pigment, and the texture works equally well on lips, cheeks, and eyes — plus it stays put even after you've masked up.