This season it’s Chanel’s L’Été Papillon: butterfly summer. Of course it is. So the palette has gone all fluttery, skittish and shimmery, and slightly elusive. There are azures and yellows and corals. There are metallic nail varnishes that gleam like the flick of a mermaid’s tail, yellow mascaras that flash like sunshine and subtle, flashing lip glosses with a flickering, summery patina.
A properly pigmented lipstick is rarely what I turn to during the day, needing, as it does, a kind of commitment that I can’t give when hurried and dashing. But a pale, sticky trowel of gunk is too Ecclestone and a bright, screamy shriek of shine will end up dominating my day. So I turn, this summer, to Chanel’s Lèvres Scintillantes (who doesn’t want scintillating lips?) Glossimer in Envolée, which means ‘fly away’. And there is a weightlessness to this peachy shimmer, a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, a butterfly transience that makes it the perfect weight for those summer days when lightness is all, when effort feels undignified, when you want to feel as though you might just take off.
This gloss sits comfortably on an unmade-up face and makes for an elegant beach lip. It reads as more polished than a tinted balm (and with more staying power), but less determined than a big old piled-on porny pout. Basically it’s kissy-lips. Alluring. Unintimidating. Boy-friendly. Quietly, Frenchly, subtly hot.
Chanel Lèvres Scintillantes Glossimer in Envolée, £21, at selfridges.com
