MAC Stay By Me Pro Longwear Blush & Coral Bliss Cremesheen Lipstick review – going coral cray-cray!

There are a couple of colours that I think you all know I’m obsessed with. Turquoise. Purple. Glitter (oh wait… glitter isn’t a colour?!). However, there is one minor obsession that I had managed to keep under the carpet – until now! Step forward, coral!

Coral is my unsung hero. I wear it nearly every day in the form of Benefit’s pale peachy and sadly discontinued Georgia blusher, a little box of powder that takes me from rough to radiant in a matter of seconds. I have worn it occasionally on my nails (see here… and here). And over summer, I wore the hell out of it on my lips (reviews for which will filter through eventually, but basically MAC’s Watch Me Simmer = WIN). So I think it’s finally time to give coral some love on my blog with this all coral look, courtesy of MAC’s Stay By Me Pro Longwear Blush and Coral Bliss Cremesheen Lipstick.

The discontinuation of Georgia (I will save my hymn about that make-up miracle for some other time) has meant that I’ve been collecting a much-bigger-than-I-will ever-possibly-need stash of potential peachy coral dupes (plus a large pile of panic-bought Georgias… if I haven’t opened them, they’ll keep forever, right?!). Stay By Me is another to add to the arsenal of my pretty in peach options – a pale peachy-coral that brings the perfect amount of light to my corpse-like complexion. Obviously, this is a very light shade and best suited on my fellow pale and interesting sorts; frankly, it ain’t going to show up on much else.

Stay By Me has a powdery texture (quite a lot of dust gets thrown up when you sweep it with your brush) but it’s oh so soft, giving it a lovely lightweight feel once on. It was released as part of MAC’s Office Hours Collection, with one of its main selling points being its supposed long-wearing colour, so it could clock in a full day at work without needing reapplication  (cue me caterwauling 9 To 5 and doing my patented typewriter dance upon reading the press release). Personally, I found that it lived up to this claim nicely and was impressed at how long its sweeping radiance stayed on my cheeks. I loved it.

Going coral cray-cray, I teamed Stay By Me with Coral Bliss lipstick, from MAC’s Cremesheen & Pearl Collection. This is a soft romantic coral blossom colour, warm, pink leaning and with a subtle shine. On my lips, the colour doesn’t show up quite as vividly as the swatch on my hand, but this is an easy everyday kind of lipstick that’s realllly very pretty.

Although the lipstick feels quite soft and creamy on first application, I do find it quite drying after sustained use. Less pigment also equals less wear time, and this averages around the four-hour mark (give or take a few cups of tea or gobbled up sandwiches!). The whole of the Cremesheen & Pearl Collection is well worth a look if you enjoy subtle pretty lipsticks in softer colours and in my opinion, Coral Bliss is definitely one of the stand-outs.

So now you’ve probably heard enough of the word coral to last you a lifetime. Sorry about that! But coral’s too pretty a colour and too long-lasting a love affair for me to let it hide under the shadows for too long. Stay By Me and Coral Bliss both give my complexion that perfect touch of summer… colour fads come and go but these lovelies are keepers. Gotta coral ‘em all!

MAC Stay By Me Pro Longwear Blush, $210, Office Hours Collection
MAC Coral Bliss Cremesheen Lipstick, $145, Cremesheen & Pearl Collection

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Note: these products were provided for my consideration.