If a lip balm came out in 2023, it was shiny. These new balms are ultra-reflective and make lips glisten while offering the same comfort and moisture as your old faithful Chapstick. Over the past year, I’ve found myself reaching for them over anything else. I wear them to dinner, on Zoom, at the gym. These days, if my lips look glossy, at least half of the time it’s because of a lip balm. And that wasn’t true just for me. Glossy lip balms were everywhere: in my friend’s makeup bags, at events, all over my For You page. Their popularity is a sea change for the category, which hasn’t been this exciting since the EOS era. Lip balms are traditionally functional, with the most popular options, like Burt’s Bees, offering a flat, satiny finish with ingredients that moisturize chapped lips. They’re designed to be invisible, a base layer for the much more exciting gloss or lipstick. On the other hand, true glosses, like MAC Lipglass, are notoriously ineffective at moisturizing. They just sit on top of the dryness.
As the steward of our lip-balm Best in Class post, I called in nearly every new launch this year, from Rhode’s peptide lip treatment to Vacation’s SPF Lip Oil to Ourself Lip Conditioner. I would guess that I’ve swiped on at least 15 different formulas in 2023. Of all those I tried, only one was matte, and it didn’t even come out this year. (It’s the La Roche Posay Effaclar Mat, and I got it in a goody bag at a LRP holiday party).
Although glossy-balm dominance seems sudden, it isn’t. I’ve been tracking this shift for years. I wrote about Laneige’s extremely popular nighttime sleeping mask at the end of last year as the big story in balms. It had become ubiquitous among celebrities (it was mentioned over five times in our series What I Can’t Live Without), and while it’s genuinely moisturizing, it’s also a little bit shiny, which I think is really what made it so popular. A glossier-than-normal-but-not-blindingly-shiny mouth has the power to make one feel pulled together without doing too much, acting like a great slouchy coat over a sweatsuit.
In response to that daytime “off-label” use, in 2019 Laneige launched a glowy lip balm that was basically a lip gloss but packed with nourishing ingredients such as shea butter. The Laneige Glowy Lip Balm turned out to be a blueprint for all the glossy balms to come. About a year later, Summer Fridays launched the first version of its lip balm, which came in an Aesop-esque aluminum tube, was packed with shea butter, and tasted like vanilla. I was surprised by its glossiness; it was nearly as shiny as my Lime Crime gloss. I went feral for this lip balm, and at some point I had one in every bag. Its thick but nourishing formula felt nice on the lips, and it could replace lip gloss in a pinch. It became my daytime go-to, and eventually I was wearing it whenever I wanted a shiny mouth but also wanted to be able to eat. At that point, very few lip balms were doing that. Even the popular, statusy ones, like Glossier’s Balm Dot Com, were offering more of a soft gleam, a subtle reflection of light. There was still lots of daylight between a lip balm and a proper gloss, but that window was rapidly closing as the formulas got shinier without sacrificing comfort.
Then Rhode lip treatment launched last summer and took shininess to about a 7.5 on my scale (with Lipglass being my 10). After wearing it for a few weeks, I thought I’d reached glossy-lip-balm heaven. I could swipe it on very dry lips and have both a shiny and moisturized mouth. But that didn’t last. It wasn’t long before Rhode started breaking me out (I’m notoriously sensitive to added fragrance). I couldn’t wear it anymore, but Rhode lip treatment transformed the lip balm–lip gloss divide into an imperceptible line. It’s both gloss and balm. Lots of similar formulas have followed. NudeStix launched its lip balm (gloss level: 7.8) a few months ago, and it’s currently out of stock on Sephora’s website. Rare Beauty has a glossy lip balm out, as does Ilia, which has a gloss factor of 7.9. And just this morning, Saltair’s shiny lip balms landed on my doorstep (I haven’t tried them yet).
I’ve noticed that this glossy-balm shift has pushed makeup brands to be more thoughtful in their gloss formulations. These days it’s rare for me to come across a gloss that doesn’t tout skin-care benefits — Tower28’s lip jelly, for example, contains five different lip oils and wears off to a balmlike finish. Ten years ago, I would be lucky to find a lip gloss that didn’t leave my lips feeling crusty and stripped. I’m interested to see how long the glossy-balm wave lasts. If the dewy-skin craze is any indication, we’ll be here for quite some time. And for me, that’s a great thing. I’m getting everything I’ve ever wanted out of a balm — shiny and moisturized lips.
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