Almay Smart Shade Butter Kiss Review and Swatches

Almay Smart Shade Butter Kiss, ($5.99 at Bed, Bath,and Beyond) is a new range of tinted lip balms that will likely be hitting drugstores everywhere very soon.

Unlike the rest of Almay's Smart Shade line, these are not "color adjusting". Instead, they're called Smart Shade due to three different color ranges that are meant to suit different skin tones: Light, Light/Medium, and Medium.


Each skintone range has a Pink, Nude, Berry, and Red shade that's supposed to compliment them. Since I'm pretty pale, I chose the Pink and Nude shades from the Light Skintone range.

The packaging is pretty with a metallic tube that matches the shades, plus they have clear caps so that you can actually see the color of the product. However, they are a huge pain in the neck to open! In the photo below, you can see a small sliver of a black base at the bottom...that's all you have to grip while trying to pull the clear cap off (which fits very tightly). My fingers kept slipping off the base because there was only enough room to hold it with the very tips of my fingers. It wasn't a fun experience and may or may not have resulted in me throwing it back in the bag in frustration and walking away from it for a while.

Looking at these, they remind me of Revlon Colorburst Lip Butters, which is not a surprise since Revlon owns Almay...here's another example of brands copying their sister brands (see my recent Maybelline Lash Sensational post-it's almost identical to L'Oréal Voluminous Butterfly). The Revlon balms had the same hard-to-open packaging too.

As far as the scent goes, they smell sweet like cake batter or vanilla cookies. They feel smooth going on, but I think the Revlon Colorburst balms are a little creamier and feel more moisturizing on my dry lips.

Pigmentation-wise, these can vary. The Pink shade for Light Skintones is very pigmented but the Nude shade took several swatches just to get to the amount of pigment shown in the photo below. The Nude also has a little shimmer in it while the Pink does not.

Sorry to use this photo again since I used it for the Maybelline Lash Sensational post, but I'm also wearing the Almay Butter Kiss in Pink in it, so I wanted you to see how pigmented it is...it's almost like a lipstick! But the Nude shade is much more sheer and in photos it just looked like my natural lips with some shine.

After wearing these around for a while, I noticed my lips started to feel dry after an hour or so. So if you have very dry skin and lips like I do, these may not be enough moisture for you. Not to mention the packaging is a miss for me...I don't want to have to fight with it every time I want to use it.

Have you seen these in your area or tried them yet? 

**Disclosure: The item(s) featured in this post were purchased by me.**