5 posts tagged "Bite Beauty"
EXCLUSIVE: Bite Beauty Sets Up Shop
Since launching Bite Beauty two years ago, entrepreneur Susanne Langmuir has had a string of successes. Her lipcentric lineup of crème lipsticks, rouge pots, matte pencils, and sheer balms—all formulated with food-grade ingredients, such as organic shea and fruit butters spiked with red-wine resveratrol, a powerful antioxidant—was picked up by Sephora, where it has been sold exclusively ever since. The range’s point of difference on the primping emporium’s increasingly crowded shelves is not just its green-leaning ethos, but its shockingly vivid color payoff; we’ve used all manner of all-natural lipsticks before, but none that deliver quite like Bite, which is a real passion project for Langmuir. “My favorite experience is when I am mixing and blending new and inspired color creations,” she says—an experience that will now be part of the public domain.
Starting tomorrow, the Toronto-based brand will officially open the doors to its first-ever pop-up shop in Soho, where customers can mix their own lip color and then watch as a troop of Bite professionals actually melt, pour, and package the customized bullet. “We wanted to create something that is totally new,” Langmuir explains of what will evolve into a permanent brick-and-mortar, on Thompson Street, come September. Designed in collaboration with the Austrian firm EOOS, the space is equipped with a center bar, “play stations,” where you can actually blend multiple different cream lip colors—a zinfandel red with a little white and some peach to create a warm rose, perhaps—before you choose a scent (current choices include a superfruit blend, cherry, peppermint, and lavender) and watch as trained technicians churn out your personalized product following a five-minute heating-and-cooling process. In today’s world of complicated ingredient labels and constant clamor over the hazardous chemicals that are readily put into cosmetics, it doesn’t get more transparent than that.
Bite Beauty, 174 Prince Street, NYC, open from 11 AM – 7 PM, Tuesday-Sunday; www.bitebeauty.com.
Beauty Throwdown: Battle Liquid Lipsticks
Over the past few years of increased lip-color love, pout perfecters have graduated beyond their original, solid bullet format. There are now glosses of the shimmering and matte varieties; thick, nubby colored pencils; subtly tinted pots of balm; jars of watery tint; and markers soaked with bright pigment. But the latest medium on everyone’s mind is liquid. Thicker and shinier than a traditional tint, with the dense pigmentation of a lipstick and the immovable grip of a pencil, they are designed to be lighter-weight with a lacquered finish that is extra impactful. How best to go about choosing from the spate of new offerings to just hit the market? A quick read through our guide below should do the trick.
The Contenders: Guerlain Rouge G L’Extrait, $48, www.neimanmarcus.com; Shiseido Lacquer Rouge, $25, www.shiseido.com; Hourglass Opaque Rouge Liquid Lipstick, $28, www.sephora.com; Bite Honey Lip Lacquer, $24, www.sephora.com
In Corner 1: Guerlain
While we may have plenty of experience with the French brand’s luxurious but complex packaging, we’re still apparently learning: It took us far too long to figure out how to unlock this sleek silver case to make that adorable mirror click open. Once we did manage to reveal the formula inside, we were pleased to discover that it has the signature, feminine scent that runs throughout the entire line. As for the spongy foam-tip applicator, it has just the right amount of slant so that the guggul-resin-infused product glides on, imparting dense color and a ridiculous velvety finish. After trying M27 (a lusty brick red), we found that while the color remains vibrant on the lips, it does have the tendency to transfer—onto glasses, fruit, and boyfriends’ shirts mid-hug (oops).
In Corner 2: Shiseido
We were feeling color indecisive with Shiseido, so we tested three of its new Lacquer Rouges, which debuted at Narciso Rodriguez’s Fall show: Drama (a deep crimson), Disco (a hot bluish pink), and Portrait (a nude rose). It has a similar, smartly shaped foam applicator as Guerlain, and an appealing creamy sheen with a lustrous finish (the product was inspired by Japanese lacquerware). Also, Shiseido gets major points for its easy, portable packaging.
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Tint For Tat
Considering a fraction of the lipstick you put on your mouth reliably ends up inside of your mouth, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that more natural, chemical-free pout perfectors have started to saturate the market. But Bite Beauty founder Susanne Langmuir did them all one better by formulating her line of Lip Rouges, Matte Pencils, Lip Shines, Sheer Balms, and Crème Lipsticks not just with organic oils, fruit butters, and food-grade pigments but with red wine resveratrol as well. The potent antioxidant is also packed into her new Lush Lip Tints, which feature six different shades of glossy, free radical-fighting color. The slanted bullets apply like a buildable stain with a hidden highlighter in the center—in the shape of the letter B (for Bite)—to help subtly plump lips. It’s the super-emollient feel that’s the biggest sell here, though—and the fact that all of the subtle hues serve double duty, imparting a lovely, dewy flush when swiped across cheeks.
Whip Your Lips Into Shape
When Sula Beauty founder Susanne Langmuir launched Bite Beauty last year, her goal was simple: Start a revolution in the oft-overlooked lipcare category with a line of pout-centric products formulated using only food-grade ingredients bolstered by the antioxidant-fighting power of red wine resveratrol. All right; maybe it wasn’t that simple—but it was a great idea and it didn’t take long for Bite’s selection of Lip Rouges, Lip Shines, and High Pigment Matte Pencils to find fast fans with women looking for bold color without all the chemical additives. For its latest coup, Bite is tackling the treatment phase before color comes into play. It’s new Whipped Cherry Lip Scrub boasts cherry fruit acids and rice bran to exfoliate dry patches, while additional extracts of jojoba beads and vitamin C serve to soothe and brighten the newly exposed skin. Like the rest of the range, the scrub also has long-lasting results thanks to the addition of resveratrol, which helps to eliminate the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles around the lip area. We know what you may be thinking: lip scrubs? That sounds gratuitous. But we can tell you from personal experience that no amount of lip balm will completely remedy a truly chapped pout unless you exfoliate first. Your lips—and your lipstick—will thank you; you don’t want the statement your bright red or fuchsia bullet makes to be “flaky.”
Take A Bite Out Of Your Beauty Routine
“It’s color and skincare all in one,” Bite Beauty founder Susanne Langmuir explained of her new natural makeup brand when we met with her in anticipation of its launch a few months back. The concept is a familiar one in this era of fusing natural cosmetics with anti-aging benefits. But Langmuir, who also started Sula beauty, is charting new territory with Bite, as it boasts a completely lip-specific lineup infused with the powerful antioxidant red-wine resveratrol—a first for the category. “Lips have been a missed opportunity for food-grade products,” she says. “I love Whole Foods, but I don’t want to shop there for cosmetics.” While the natural-goods purveyor now sells a wide selection of good-for-you foundations, blushes, eye shadows, and mascaras, you’re hard-pressed to find a vivid red lip stain or a hot fuchsia lipstick among its offerings. And vivid is the key word here. Like much of its competition, Bite uses only organic shea and fruit butters without the use of polybutenes and petroleum byproducts, but Langmuir has managed to source vibrant colorants that are all food grade for her latest venture. The Lip Rouge is as crimson as it appears in its pot and can be worn sheer on mouths or cheeks or built up for more opacity, and our personal favorite, the High Pigment Matte Pencil, comes in six shockingly bold colors. Luminous Crème Lipsticks, Lip Shines, and Sheer Balms round out the offerings. The fact that you will ingest a fraction of whatever pigment you put on your pout is inevitable; knowing that your products are actually good enough to eat makes that fact a bit easier to digest.