Do I Need This? Lip Primer (Comparison of Too Faced Lip Insurance Lip Primer, e.l.f. Lip Lock Pencil, and Bite Beauty Line & Define Lip Primer)

Disclosure: Affiliate links.

Welcome to the latest installment of my Do I Need This? series. In these posts, I offer my experience and opinion about whether or not I think a product or technique is worth it. Obviously, you don't really need ANY beauty products, so the answer to the question is always going to be no, to some extent. But is it going to change your life (or face)? Is it going to make things easier? Are you going to notice any difference at all? That's what I'm getting at. You may disagree with my verdict, because we all have different bodies/faces/brains/desires, but I'll try to offer a starting point, at least. 

One of the ways beauty companies keep us buying things is by continually creating new categories of suddenly indispensable products. Primer is one category that has certainly been growing over the last five years or so. Suddenly we need to prime everything: our faces, our eyelids, and even, apparently, our hair. I'm not going to be buying any hair primer, and foundation primer rarely seems to actually do anything to improve my makeup, but eyeshadow primer has actually become essential for me. I used to rarely bother with eyeshadow because it creased and melted off in a couple of hours, so primer makes a huge difference. But lipsticks and lip glosses can be finicky and fleeting too. Will lip primer do anything to make our lives easier? Or is it just another gimmick?

Do you need lip primer?

Short answer: Maybe, if you have problems with lip color feathering or pigmented glosses fading.

I'm going to compare three different lip primers here--one very cheap and two pretty expensive, one a thick liquid and two waxy sticks. Too Faced Lip Insurance Lip Primer ($20) is a whitish, translucent liquid product that comes in a tube with a doe foot applicator. It's similar to an eyeshadow primer (though I tried using eyeshadow primer on my lips and it was not a success). Bite Beauty Line & Define Lip Primer ($22) and e.l.f. Lip Lock Pencil ($3) are very similar, hard, matte, waxy crayons. The main difference is that the Bite product smells minty. (Note: I have a mini version of the Bite primer, which was part of the holiday Bite Discovery Kit.) No swatches of the primers here, because they are all nearly transparent. All three products make essentially the same claims: to prevent feathering and make lip color last longer. I tested each product with the same tricky lip gloss and lipstick.

Not my greatest photography.

First up, lip gloss. One of my favorite lip glosses is Avon Glazewear in Intense Plum (now sadly discontinued but still available on Amazon). As the name suggests, it's a quite pigmented purplish gloss. The problem is that that once I blot it, most of the color disappears. Wearing a thick layer of it, however, isn't really an option, because it gets messy and smeary. Too high maintenance. So a primer that can keep it in place at full strength would be ideal.

(Many, many photos below, so I will give you a cut.)