If you’re a beauty addict like I am, you know how excited I was when I heard that BITE Beauty opened up a lip lab in Toronto. If you’re not so familiar, this is a place where you can customize your very own lip shade. What’s more, if you ever fell in love with a lipstick shade, but that brand discontinued that specific colour, you can bring it in and have them recreate it for you, how clever is that?!
There are hundreds of pigments to choose from, so you can create a subtle and natural shade, to a bold colour with a pop. Keep reading and check out the video of our experience below!
I was in Toronto a couple of weeks ago with a group of girlfriends for a bachelorette party, and one of the activities was an evening at the BITE Beauty Lip Lab on Queen St West. For the darlings who live south of the border, there’s a lip lab in NYC. Since we were there for a private event, we had access to a private area and were served some bubble and food, but the concept is just the same.
Sitting down with a consultant, I described my normal makeup habits and the current lip colours I wear. They assess your personality, your fashion and your tastes to come up with your very own shade. They take different pigment colours, blend it all together and give you a swatch to try it on. You can also choose the type of finish, whether it’s matte, semi-matte or glossy. If you know me, you know that I’m a matte kind of girl, but I decided to go for the semi-matte finish, which they call cuvee, and it’s their most popular finish.
I described my ideal colour to be a natural one but with a pop. He grabbed a few pods, scraped out a smidge of pigment and mixed it all together until combined. With a small lip brush, he handed me my colour to try on. At the first attempt, it there wasn’t enough pop to it. It looked similar to my Nars lipstick in Stepping Out, so I asked him, and I used this exact word, if he can make it more “poppy”. So he went back to colours and made one that can more of a vibrant deep pink colour (you can see a swatch of my colour in the image above). It was a winner and exactly what I wanted!
I found that sometimes you just need to leave it to the pros to concoct the perfect shade for you. When you’re so specific about what you want, you won’t be delighted at the end, and this is what I noticed with all the girls. We gave a direction but then let the experts do their thing, and when we swatched it on our lips, we knew, like a wedding dress, that the shade was “the one”. But wait, the fun doesn’t end there! You also get to choose the scent of your lipstick! There are several fragrances such as mint, citrus, mango, coconut and vanilla, and I decided to mix mint and vanilla into mine, which smells amazing! It’s another personal touch that really makes your lipstick your own.
After 20 minutes or so, your lipstick is ready! You receive it in a small boxed package with your lipstick with your name engraved on it. So next when you’re getting ready with the girls, you won’t mistaken which lipstick is yours.
You can pop in to the BITE Beauty Lip Lab and check out the setup, and you can purchase one of their lipsticks from their current collection, which is also available at Sephora, or you can opt to take in the experience and create your own shade for $55. Although it’s more expensive than what I would normally spend on a lipstick, it was really interesting and fun to see how a lipstick is made and to be able to create my own colour that’s just for me.
For a full view of the experience, check out the video!
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