Duping Too Faced Melted Peony

Truth time: I love a lot of lipstick formulas that other people hate. This is partially because I am willing to exfoliate my lips daily and deal with a more drying formula in exchange for a matte finish and an apocalypse-proof wear time. I always try to make this clear in my reviews.

But even I stumble on to products that are just too damn wrong for my lips. Meet Too Faced Melted Peony: the most perfect sorta-nude-lip for me, with a great balance of peach and pink. The color is gorgeous...the formula is atrocious. Seriously, I have never put anything so drying or finicky on my lips before--and I wear Ruby Woo on the regular!

And so I went on a long and arduous quest to find a dupe. Most supposed dupes were way too pale and beige, or bubblegum pink with no peach, or in yet another formula I hate with a burning passion. Finally, somebody mentioned Bite Beauty's High Pigment Pencil in Bouquet. Great! I love the Bite formula! After searching numerous swap and sale threads for an on-the-cheap tube, I managed to obtain Bouquet via swap.

Annnnnd I love it.

Daylight on top, flash on bottom.

Here are ze swatches. As you can hopefully see, Melted Peony and Bouquet aren't exactly alike, but they're super similar: Melted Peony is a bit paler and more peach, Bouquet has more pink and is brighter.

I swatched a few other shades in the same-ish color family for comparison. Bite Velvet is brighter, cooler, and more pink than Melted Peony. MAC Faux is actually a muted neutral pink on me, but because it has more brown in it than these other shades, it looks crazy dark in these swatch photos.

Here's how Bite Bouquet looks on my lips. Again, it's definitely a bit brighter than Melted Peony, and it reads more as a peach-pink than a nude. But I think it's a pretty damn good replacement. In a sense, any time I could wear Melted Peony, I can now wear Boquet.

I'll continue to try nude lipsticks because I'm a lipstick fanatic and I love to try ALL TEH THINGS, but for now, I'm oh so happy with Bite Bouquet!

Oh, and yeah, I'm wearing a shit ton of glitter on my eyes. God bless you, Lit Cosmetics Clearly Liquid Base! (The actual glitter in this picture is a limited edition Wet n' Wild product...which may or may not be eye safe. Oops. Do your research--check for it around Halloween!)