Experts say diffused, ’90s brown lip shades are currently trending
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A sartorial cornerstone of autumn, brown feels like an intuitive choice for September as the colors of the leaves get warmer and the air cools. In beauty, brown lipstick in particular bridges summer’s punchier palette and winter’s more festive hues. “You get the richness and impact of a statement lip, but there’s an ease to brown that feels very fresh,” says Violette Serrat , French makeup artist and founder and CEO of Violette_Fr. It’s familiar, yet still a little unexpected.
“Red has this incredible confidence and vavavoom energy, while brown gives you confidence in a quieter, more unexpected way,” Serrat tells Bazaar . “It still brings so much character to the face, but it feels more understated. There’s something about that subtlety that I find incredibly chic.” If brown is a key pillar of autumn style, subtlety is the pillar of French style. That’s why Serrat’s newest curation, Bisou Balm in Chocolat , is a muted take on brown lipstick, one that trades precision and perfection for carefree cool.
For the uninitiated, the cult Bisou Balm is a sheer matte lipstick-meets-balm, designed to deliver buildable color that’s undefined for a ‘just-kissed’ look. “Brown can feel incredibly sophisticated, but when you wear it sheer and blurred, suddenly, it becomes very relaxed and easy,” Serrat says. “It gives the face something without looking like you tried too hard.”
The impactful, unapologetic brown lips that became a supermodel trademark in the ‘90s have made a welcome return of late. But French beauty is always about a certain effortlessness. “So with a brown lip, I like it a little imperfect – never too defined or precise,” Serrat says. Apply it straight from the bullet, blur the edges with your finger, and keep the rest of the face very fresh, letting the lip be the focus, she suggests. “It should almost feel like you put it on without thinking about it.”
This take on a minimalist ’90s aesthetic may be a no-brainer, but brown is surprisingly versatile. For her campaign, pictured below, Serrat paired the Chocolat Bisou Balm with a smoky eye and fresh pink blush for a touch of Dolce Vita energy. Equally compelling is brown-on-brown: Taking the shade across the eyes, cheeks, and lips for harmonious depth.
In line with her brand’s no-rules attitude, Serrat painstakingly created Chocolat to be universally flattering, as the hue can be notoriously tricky to marry with all skin tones. Famed makeup artist Bobbi Brown , who launched her first make-up empire in the early ’90s with 10 brown-based lipsticks, knows this well. When choosing from most brands, “you need to pay attention to your skin tone but also your lip color,” she tells us. Too dark a brown can read as aging, she says, while too light can wash you out.
“Your choices are either a pinky undertone or a warm undertone,” she explains. “If your lips and skin are deeper, you can go for either a blue tone or a bronzy tone.” Her rule of thumb? “The darker your skin, the more blue-toned your lipstick should be.” Decades on, having stepped away from her eponymous brand and founded Jones Road, she still has the shade that shares her name as a fixture in her world. The Classic Lip , a lightweight but heavily pigmented satin, in Chocolate (a deep neutral brown) and Cognac (a rich reddish brown),…