Experience unlimited matte comfort
NEW Unlimited Stylo
Experience unlimited matte comfort with KIKO MILANO's New Unlimited Stylo: a melting lipstick with a velvety finish and intense colour payoff, incredibly soft on the lips.
-Formulated with a mix of nourishing ingredients and clinically proven to last up to 10 hours*. -An rich and creamy, innovative, transfer-proof texture* with a demi-matte finish -Easy and comfortable to apply thanks to the new, elegant slim format
For an enhanced look, first smooth and even out the colour of your lips with the New Universal Blur Lip Primer. Improves the hold of your lipstick while making it smudge-proof.
Kiko's New Unlimited Stylo is a long-lasting lipstick with a semi-matte finish. Kiko Milano claims that this product "clings to the lips, leaving a uniform coat of colour and a precisely outlined lip contour". It costs £8.90 and comes in 21 different shades. I have the shade 04 Pearly Rosy Mauve.
First Impressions: The packaging is sleek and unique, with an aluminium effect and an accurate representation of the lipstick shade shown on the lid. I think the design is beautiful and could easily get distracted by snapping the lid on and off again and admiring the golden K embossed in the centre! The lipstick has a slightly sweet fragrance which fades when applied.
Application: This product glides on very smoothly. The colour appears sheer at first, but the pigment settles onto the lips and is buildable. I am a fan of this lipstick bullet shape, which really does hug the lips and makes for foolproof application. The product feels soft, smooth and matte when applied.
The Cup of Coffee Test:
There was minimal transfer to my cup and the lipstick looked perfect after drinking. I am very impressed with the staying power of this product.
After eating, my lips began to feel slightly dry at the corners, but the lipstick still looked good. It had faded extremely gracefully as you can see above.
The lipstick applied over itself well, although not quite as smoothly as onto bare lips. Close up, you can see the second application has a little more texture, but in real life it was hardly noticeable.
After 6 hours' wear
This is the most comfortable long-lasting lip product I have tried. The semi-matte finish means that it is not drying, and I think it performed really well. By the end of the day it was starting to rub off around the corners of my mouth, but it held the lip shape perfectly and did not cause my lips to flake as most long-lasting products do.
Overall: This is a smooth and long-wearing lipstick which looks great both on the lips and in its packaging. It has a thin, comfortable formula which wears well and re-applies over itself, and for me this colour is a perfect, cool mauve.
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Find this lipstick here: //www.kikocosmetics.com/en-gb/make-up/lips/lipsticks/New-Unlimited-Stylo/p-KM00201025
Packaging: This is a stylo lipstick in a silver metal packaging with a gold toned brand logo clasp in the centre, with the brand name printed in frosted type on the front bottom. It’s lightweight but feels more luxe than your standard drugstore lipstick. My only criticism is that the rounded ends of the tube don’t allow for a shade name or colour sticker to be printed on the base; additionally there is no window into the product that would allow you to discern which colour is inside the tube. To fix this issue the product comes with a coloured sticker and its corresponding number applied to the back of the tube, but to me that sticker ruins the sleek look of the packaging. Therefore, if you end up buying several shades but want to remove the shade stickers so that the tube looks prettier, you’ll have to open up every tube to find the colour you want to apply. Just a minor annoyance.
Application: The formula is thin and creamy, so it glides on easily with no dragging. It’s pigmented so only requires one swipe for full colour payoff. The stylo has a rounded tip, which I found made it a bit less accurate to apply than a flat or pointed tip, but that will wear down soon enough, and won’t be a problem for those who use a lip liner or apply with a lip brush as a rule.
Once applied, it takes a couple minutes to dry down completely into a transfer-proof finish. Even once it feels dry I found that my first few presses of my mouth to a tissue or my hand came away with a little residue, but this didn’t happen after touch ups, so I think I over-apply during the initial application as a result of trying to perfect the shape of my lips, not that the product has an excessive drying down time. Giving it a gentle blot after its dried following that first application is all that is needed to ‘seal’ the finish, so to speak. After that, it has a matte and lightweight finish on the lips, but it does feel a little dry. Nowhere near as dry as matte liquid lipsticks tend to feel, like my Holy Grail Maybelline’s Superstay Matte Inks, so if you can’t stand liquid lipsticks for that reason this might be a more bearable option for you.
Wear: Once dry, I experienced no transfer from drinking or any small brushes of my mouth, for example by hand or cheek kisses, etc. Even when I blew my nose, which would typically smudge my Cupid’s bow in a lipstick that isn’t transfer-proof. Upon eating a snack of crisps/chips drunk alongside a soda by straw, there was minor wear on the centre of my lips, as expected. The product touched up beautifully after that, layering without piling or feeling claggy or thick. When I ate a meal a few hours later, it wore away in the centre as I would expect any lipstick to do, and performed similarly to the Nars Powermatte lipstick. Scroll past the upcoming swatches section to see the wear test in full–below it I’ve added my wear test photos of the Nars Powermatte from my past review so you can compare their performances.
Lip swatches in in-direct daylight, from top to bottom: 10 Universal Rose, 13 Fuchsia, 15 Classic Red, 17 Cherry Red, 24 Burgundy
Lip swatches in LED ring lighting, from top to bottom: 10 Universal Rose, 13 Fuchsia, 15 Classic Red, 17 Cherry Red, 24 Burgundy
Arm swatches in L to R: in-direct daylight, LED ring lighting, and direct daylight
10 – Universal Rose
10 Universal Rose in in-direct daylight
10 Universal Rose in LED ring lighting
13 Fuchsia
13 Fuchsia in in-direct daylight
13 Fuchsia in LED ring lighting
15 Classic Red
15 Classic Red in in-direct daylight
15 Classic Red in LED ring lighting
17 Cherry Red
17 Cherry Red in in-direct daylight
17 Cherry Red in LED ring lighting
24 Burgundy
24 Burgundy in in-direct daylight
24 Burgundy in LED ring lighting
WEAR TEST
You can see below how this lipstick performed for me throughout a day’s wear. Please do note, however, that I don’t adapt how I eat or drink at all when wearing lipstick, with no delicate peeling back of the lips to avoid cutlery or any similar dainty behaviours, so I’m sure careful and lipstick-conscious eaters will find these perform better than my wear tests suggests–consider this a worse case scenario for the lipstick’s performance, really.
For my wear test below, I ate the same kind of snack and meal that I test all my lipsticks with when I review them here on my blog, so you can more easily compare how lipsticks perform against one another.
Wear test. 1] Freshly applied. 2] After eating a packet of crisps/chips and drinking a soda by straw. 3] Reapplied after the snack. 4] After eating a vegetable burger and drinking a large glass of water without a straw.
For comparison:
My NARS POWERMATTE wear test, for comparison, in Notorious
Overall: I love this lipstick. I wear Maybelline’s Superstay Matte Inks for almost all circumstances, but I will happily wear these Kiko lipsticks for almost any occasion when I would usually rely upon the Matte Inks to give me smudge-proof wear. If you hate the dryness of liquid lipsticks, this lipstick is a great long-wearing option instead. If you love the Nars Powermatte lipstick but can’t afford to repurchase it regularly because the amount of product you receive for the price is too steep, this works as a near perfect dupe in performance, with that initial blot on a tissue to ‘seal’ the finish the only difference I noticed between them. Likewise, if you want to try the Powermatte’s but just can’t justify the price, this lipstick is a great dupe at just over a 1/3 of the price. It will certainly become a staple in my makeup routine now, and I’ll happily purchase other shades.
There are 24 shades of the New Unlimited Stylo and Kiko Milano offers a discount code if you sign up to their newsletter for money off your order. I didn’t get hit with custom fees when my order of 4 lipsticks arrived from Italy, and I also found most shades available on Amazon UK, which were eligible for Prime delivery.