L’Oreal Colour Riche Extraordinaire is a new lip gloss with 16 shades that offers rich, glossy color and smooths the surface of lips. From the ads I’ve seen, these seemed like they might be some sort of liquid lipstick but to me they feel mostly like a gloss. They have a moisturizing, non-sticky feel and offer vibrant but sheer to semi-opaque color. Dancing Rose is a purplish pink with lots of fine multi-colored sparkles and Rouge Allegro is a bright pinkish red with no sparkles or shimmer.
Price/Quantity: About $8.00 for 0.18 Fl. Oz. / 5.5 mL
Availability: Drugstores, Ulta, Target
Packaging: Short, lipstick-sized gloss tube. The outside of the packaging is a metallic, reflective gold with a swatch of the color inside on the front. There is a label on the top with the color name as well. The rounded doe foot applicator is very soft to the touch and pulls out enough gloss to cover lips without having to go back into the tube. I have an acrylic lipstick caddy and these fit nicely in the compartments right next to my lipsticks.
Smell: These have a light floral fragrance that I only noticed when I smelled the applicator or smelled a swatch on my hand. I can somewhat taste the fragrance. It faded away soon after I applied the product.
Application: One pass is enough for me to get plenty of color and shine from these glosses. If I attempt to add a second layer, it does smooth out lip lines but it also looks too thick, bordering on goopy. So, one layer is just perfect.
Texture/Finish: There is no stickiness in this gloss, even when I press my lips together. They feel moisturizing but they also have a slight “oily” feel to them, which makes sense since L’Oreal says that these are infused with micro-oils. Some of these have shimmer and sparkle and others have none. I like the sparkles in the shades I bought because they are big enough to see but you can barely feel them. There are incredibly shiny and glassy-looking.
Pigmentation: Both are semi sheer but Dancing Rose is slightly more opaque than Rouge Allegro. They can be built up to appear more opaque or sheered out to give just a hint of color and shine. For me, it is most comfortable to wear a light-medium weight coating of these on the lips because they have a heavier feel than some other glosses I have tried. The ads I have seen for these give the impression that they would look very loud on the lips but they are not.
Longevity: After about 3 hours Rouge Allegro bled into the cracks and crevices of my lips and migrated outside lip lines but it did stay vibrant and shiny for 5 hours. Dancing Rose also stayed vibrant and shiny for 5 hours and didn’t have any bleeding issues.
Worth Buying?
Because of the bleeding/migrating issue, I wouldn’t recommend Rouge Allegro but Dancing Rose is worth buying if you like extra glossy lips and semi-opaque color. If you like lighter weight glosses (like Maybelline Color Sensational High Shine Glosses), or you like opaque to nearly opaque glosses then you might not like these as much. The light fragrance doesn’t bother me but those that are extra sensitive to smells may want to be wary of that.
