EroStick lip gloss - sensual bath by Kama Sutra - review by Jul!a

The overall purpose of this lip gloss is to "accentuate your pout with a luminous shine, while exciting the senses with a cooling tingle." The mint version will definitely provide a tingling sensation, and the cherry and strawberry versions should provide some warming sensations. It also shines wonderfully as a general lip gloss; leaving the lips silky, smooth, and feeling wonderfully moisturized. You'll be able to tell you're wearing something, but it shouldn't bother most people.

From what I've been able to tell, this gloss has about the same consistency as just about any other lip gloss that comes in this particular type of container. If you remove the wand and hold the container upside down, nothing comes out, but it does spread very easily across the lips and stays where you put it. It can feel a bit sticky to the touch, but on the lips it feels silky.

This is available in 3 flavors; mint, strawberry, and cherry. This particular review is about the mint flavor. It's hard for me to pinpoint the specific type of mint that this reminds me of. At first I thought spearmint, then kept sniffing and settled on something much closer to an Andes chocolate. Or mouthwash. A cross between peppermint and winter fresh mint, and it tastes pretty much the same. The scent is strong if you're up close, but isn't going to be able to be smelled or tasted on anybody who isn't close enough to be kissed.

I found that as a gloss, this outperformed my usual chapstick in how long I could go before I felt like I needed to reapply it. I normally put my chapstick on every 2 hours or so, but this I got about 4 out of before I felt like all the glossiness was gone. It also accentuated my lips in the way that only a shiny clear gloss can. It hasn't stained anything yet but it does seem to leave a slightly sticky residue behind on the skin. However it's no worse than any other comparable lip gloss. On pretty much all fronts really. Except that with this lip gloss, I felt a tingle on my lips for a while. It was hard to pin down an exact time, but it was long enough to be noticeable but not so long that I felt like my lips had been permanently altered. I would say no more than 15 or so total minutes of extra tingles. On the skin though, there wasn't really any tingling felt.

The packaging for this was really nice. The gloss comes inside a sealed cardboard case, inside another cardboard sheath. The outer sheath matches the gloss inside in general color and pictures the tube of gloss on the side cover. The most risque part of the box is where it says on the front "for pleasures far beyond kissing" and the title of "love me mint." The .16 fluid ounce tube itself is free of any embellishments except down at the bottom where it has a sticker that says "love me mint erostick clear lip gloss with a cooling tingle" and you can easily peel off that sticker if you want.

The back claims this gloss is the ultimate in oral enhancement in 4 different languages, although fails to specify what type of oral enhancement and phrases the paragraph to most definitely imply kissing. The back also lists the ingredients as hydrogenated polyisobutene, ethylene/propylene/styrene copolymer, butylene/ethylene/styrene copolymer, carthamus tinctorius (safflower) seed oil, flavor (aroma), VP/hexadecene copolymer, phenoxyethanol, water (aqua/eau), laureth-4, menthoxypropanediol, sodium saccharin, tocopheryl acetate, ricinus communis (castor) seed oil, blue 1 lake, yellow 5, ethylhexyl palmitate, tribehenin, sorbitan isostearate, palmitoyl oligopeptide, vanillyl butyl ether.

The ingredients list looked a bit scary, so I went and looked everything up that I could. Here's what I found:

According to the Skin Deep Cosmetics Database, the scariest thing on here is the tocopheryl aceatate, and from what I've seen the ingredients here may be lengthy in list, but aren't uncommon in lip glosses in general.

Hydrogenated polyisobutene is a moisturizer, ethylene/propylene/styrene copolymer and butylene/ethylene/styrene copolymer are both agents used to create the slightly gel like consistency of the gloss, carthamus tinctorius (safflower) seed oil is used as a skin conditioning agent, flavor (aroma), VP/hexadecene copolymer is also used to create the consistency of the gloss, phenoxyethanol is a preservative, water (aqua/eau), laureth-4 is an emulsifier, menthoxypropanediol is a flavoring agent, sodium saccharin is an artificial sweetener, tocopheryl acetate is a skin conditioning antioxidant that some people may have allergies to, ricinus communis (castor) seed oil is a skin conditioning agent, blue 1 lake and yellow 5 are both dyes that create the lovely green color, ethylhexyl palmitate and tribehenin are skin conditioning agents, sorbitan isostearate is an emulsifier, palmitoyl oligopeptide is another skin conditioning agent, and so is vanillyl butyl ether.

I'm not really a lip gloss kind of girl, but I couldn't pass up getting a chance to try this out. I admit that I'd prefer a different scent/flavor, but the mint isn't that bad, which says a lot because I'm not normally a fan of mint. And that coupled with the fact that it only seems to smell and taste all minty for 20 minutes at the most and leaves me with hours of kissably soft lips in the process? I really like it. My husband doesn't care for it as much because he doesn't overly enjoy the texture while we're kissing, but it comes off soon enough that he doesn't care much. He's more worried about ending up with colored lips than the texture, and this isn't going to stain anybody's lips. I don't know when, but I will be getting one of the other flavors in the future.

I was torn between ratings on this one; bouncing between a 4 and a 5. On the one hand, I seriously cannot find anything big wrong with it. On the other hand it's a $16 tube of lip gloss. In the end, I settled on 5 stars because objectively, there's really nothing wrong with it and I would pay $16 for another tube.