This year on Love Island, there’s only one thing that’s more talked about than contestant Faye Winter’s expletive-laden outburst, and it’s her signature brown lipstick. The internet is, in a word, obsessed. For the unfamiliar, the shade can best be described as a murky kind of brown. It's got a grey undertone and is aggressively ringed, outside the perimeter of her natural lip line, with a pencil that’s a few shades darker.
Visual shorthand for the 90s, when brown lipstick muscled its way into the mainstream, there’s a contingent on Twitter that lauds the look, with one user commenting: “I adore her commitment to the lipstick. Adore it. 24/7, rain, hail, or shine.” Then there are the detractors - those who are as irked by the shade, as they are by Faye’s dedication to, and seeming incompatibility with it. Yes, the relationship references are as rife as you’d imagine.
Like fashion, beauty is cyclical, but as Rachel Syme once wrote in The New York Times: “the ’90s makeup revival is more of a paraphrase than a direct quotation”. In this instance it’s true. While Faye’s lipstick isn’t matte, it’s also not metallic - the prevailing finish of the decade. The contrasting liner nods to it confidently, however. Now, despite the appetite for lipstick intel (the tweets go on for as long as you’re willing to scroll), we’re yet to bear witness to the application, and so can only speculate on Faye’s means and materials.
Some have suggested that like Ashley Graham, she repurposes an eyebrow pencil for the job, a tip to make lips look more pillowy, bestowed upon the model by make-up artist Katie Jane Hughes. The base shade is also unknown, but sensible suggestions include Charlotte Tilbury Matte Revolution Lipstick in Very Victoria, £25 and [Fenty Beauty Stunna Lip Paint Longwear Fluid Lip Colour in Unveil](http:// Fenty Beauty Stunna Lip Paint Longwear Fluid Lip Colour in Unveil, £20.), £20.
WATCH: How Ashley Graham Uses An Eyebrow Pencil As Lip Liner
One theory (Love Island viewers are nothing if not anthropologists) suggests that there’s a correlation between the intensity of Faye’s lipstick and the ferocity of her mood. Well, she has been known to wear pink when calm and content, and the brown did deepen after she received the postcard from Casa Amor that showed partner Teddy kissing Clarisse. Similarly, ahead of the confrontation that compelled more than 25,000 people to complain to Ofcom. Make-up for many is a kind of facial armour, and brown it appears, emboldens Faye in the face of adversity. In that case, um, we’ll pray for pink?
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