How To Make Lip Tars More Portable

Lip Tars are lovely things, being mixable, highly pigmented, and high impact. But for me, one of their selling points - that you need so little to get opaque coverage - turns into a downside; they're not particularly portable. You need to carry a little tube and a lip brush, or if you mix your own shade, a sample pot and a lip brush.

Years ago, I bought a few bits of lip product packaging as one of my favourite LE lipglosses had burst on a plane and wasn't usable. Recently, I found the dial up pen applicators I had bought and realised that they are fabulous for Lip Tars.

The picture above shows a peachy-neutral shade of Lip Tar which I mixed up in one of the applicators. It's a dial up pen format, like Stila use for their lip glosses, so you can make the compartment as small as you like - I doubt anyone would mix up enough Lip Tar to fill the thing to capacity. Once the compartment is full, you snap the sponge top into place and voila, you have a portable Lip Tar.

When you turn the dial, the Lip Tar saturates the sponge applicator, and it's easy to control the flow of product to get the opaque coverage. The photo on the right shows my custom blended colour applied to my lips with my dialup applicator.

I got my dialup pens from DIYCosmetics.com, for the reasonable price of $6.50 for a set of 10. Sadly, they're out of stock until April, but a viable alternative might be the click pens, which are $6.80 for a set of 10. Shipping is a fairly reasonable $10. There are other places to buy these containers, but they are often more expensive.

Since I have quite a few spares, we'll be giving a few away - six randomly selected people will receive two sponge tip dialup pens, and a bonus brush tip pen too. Leave a comment with a valid email address to enter - closing date is Saturday 27th at midnight, as with our other giveaway!