The Hunt For The Perfect Lipstick: A Trio of Avon Flavor Savers Lip Glosses

I'll admit it. I get fooled by online advertising too sometimes. I buy stuff that I look at and say, "Now, wait, that's not what the description said it was..." all the time. Case in point: Three lip glosses from Avon's "Flavor Savers" series. I bought them even though their tube looked just like a Chap-Stick tube.

(Side note: Growing up, we didn't use Chap-Stick in my house. My mother was an Avon Lady for a while, and she got addicted to Avon's Care Deeply Lip Balm; when she left Avon, she still would make a mass purchase of Care Deeply once a year, and we got several tubes in our Christmas stockings. I got addicted, too. I also found it made an excellent cork grease for my clarinet as I went through college on a band scholarship.)

Anyway, the lip glosses. Avon's lip gloss tubes tend to be small anyway and look like lip balm tubes with their tops on, so I figured this was just another example, and I ordered them.

I got...three flavored lip balms.

After my initial "Wow, you're really dumb" self-chastisement, I actually tried them.

No, they're not lip glosses, not by a long shot. That said, they're darned good lip balms, and a better choice than any flavored balm out there.



Candidate #1: Avon Flavor Savers Lip Gloss, #255221 (Strawberry)

Purchased: Avon Products, Inc.

Cost: $0.69

Candidate #2: Avon Flavor Savers Lip Gloss, #256202 (Cherry)

Purchased: Avon Products, Inc.

Cost: $0.69

Candidate #3: Avon Flavor Savers Lip Gloss, #256274 (Bubble Gum)

Purchased: Avon Products, Inc.

Cost: $0.69

Brand Info: Avon Products, Inc.
Founded in 1886 by then 28-year-old David H. McConnell as the California Perfume Company (CPC) in New York City in a 500 square foot manufacturing and shipping office on Chambers Street, Avon revolutionized cosmetic sale and distribution, growing to a $2M business in 1918, thanks to an innovated marketing technique: The "Avon Lady", a woman who would go door-to-door in neighborhoods, allowing customers to check out and try new makeup in the privacy of their own home. Today, Avon is a $8.1B worldwide company, selling cosmetics, clothing, toys, and other items that allow them to sell their products to men and women of all ages.

(Side note again: My mother was an Avon Lady in the late 1960s, and my first lipsticks were from my mother's old Avon lipstick sample box, tiny bullet-shaped lipsticks in a potpourri of colors. I eventually melted a lot of them down to custom-blend my own lipstick, my first experiments with color mixing.)

The Tube: Sheer plastic Chap-Stick tubes with pink and purple labels, bearing the name of the color/flavor in English and French. Really. These may be called "lip glosses", but they're little more than flavored lip balms with barely a hint of sheer color. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but a little truth in labeling would have been nice.

The Product: #1 looks like creamy strawberry chiffon; #2 is a cherry candy color; #3 is bubble gum pink. Pleasant colors, but again it's obvious they're merely colored/flavored lip balms.

The Application: Chap-Stick application; creamy lipstick smooth. No tapered tops, no fancy applicators; open the tube and smear it across your lips just like Chap-Stick. Goes on very sheer with only a hint of any color whatsoever.

The Taste: Here's where the superiority of Avon's lip balm products to Chap-Stick lies: The tastes are magnificent. You can actually taste strawberry candy, cherry kool-aid, super-sweet bubble gum.

The Blot: What blot? Seriously, you'd blot lip balm? O.K., yes, I blotted it, and there's no color in the blot at all.

The Wear: They serve their purpose (that is, they last about as long as a Chap-Stick application). Don't count on a lot of wear from these, but at under a dollar a tube, you can afford to reapply as often as you need to.

The Verdict: After I got over the mislabeling issue--seriously, these are not lip glosses, not by any stretch of the imagination--I fell in love and have re-purchased them 3 or 4 times since to fill my purse for the winter. Again, at under $1 a tube, it's cheaper than just about any lip balm out there and works very well.

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