Shu Uemura Laque Supreme in Chu Chu Coral and Wild Rose review – baby got laque!

The arrival of Shu Uemura’s latest lip product = this baby’s got laque!

Oh come on, you know I can never resist a good pun… and nor can I resist a good lippie. Shu Uemura’s Laque Supreme is a gorgeous halfway house between a lipstick and a lip gloss – but there certainly isn’t anything half-hearted about the final results!

Inspired by the high shine and rich colours of Japanese lacquerware, Laque Supreme essentially marries the consistency of a lip gloss with the intense pigmentation of a lipstick. But actually, it’s even better than that.

Top to bottom: Wild Rose/Wild Fuchsia (WN02), Chu Chu Coral (CR01)

Its texture is way more water-based than a gloss, making it much less gloopy to apply – and without that icky sticky sensation either. Meanwhile, the pigmentation is just wow. Given the Laque Supremes’ thin water-like consistency, you might expect something less saturated, but no… these beauties are drenched in glorious high-impact technicolour.

Its shine also feels way more sophisticated than a gloss; it’s more of a translucent, fresh, almost dewy effect that’s hard to explain but looks like something out of a magazine shoot. The packaging is also very slick – black high shine tubes with a tantalising window of juicy colour… so high shine in fact that dust particles seem to be magically attracted to them (and showed up in all of my photos however many times I cleaned them!).

The doe-foot applicator is also subtly different from that of your average lip gloss. Shu Uemura has neatly refined its shape and texture to a slightly firmer material than run-of-the-mill sponge, with a doe-foot that’s longer, leaner and more angled. All this allows for much more precise and clean application – after all, who isn’t down for anything that makes life just that little bit easier?

Wild Rose, also known as Wild Fuchsia (WN02), is a bright, blue-based, berry beautiful pink. It’s somewhere between cerise and raspberry and I totally heart it. Shu Uemura’s tagline for this is “strong wild” which kind of captures its tawny beauty; it manages to be a shade that’s striking yet not too scary, bright but not too brazen.

It applied evenly and was opaque in pretty much one gorgeously glossy layer; in fact, it feels almost like painting nail polish onto your lips, except it’s way easier than a mani! Lush all-round. (Excuse the pout going on in the above photo, but this photo seemed to show the shine better!)

Chu Chu Coral (CR01) might just have the cutest, most adorable, squeeze-your-chubby-little-cheeks make-up name ever. Shu Uemura’s tagline for this colour is “playful cute”, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. It’s a squishy, shiny peachy-coral that weirdly leans very tangerine on me. I found this applied less evenly than Wild Rose meaning it needed a couple more layers for a true opaque colour, and consequently settled into my lip creases a little gloopily.

I personally preferred Chu Chu Coral once I’d blotted it down a bit (see above), which seemed to balance out its orange side… turning it into exactly the shade of peachy coral I know and love. You lose a bit of the shine that way but hey, nobody’s perfect!

Just like the product itself, the wear-time on these Laque Supremes was also somewhere between a lipstick and a gloss i.e. much better than glosses (which generally seem to get swallowed in sixty seconds by you/your hair/the air) but not as long as a matte lipstick. I’d say they last about 3-6 hours, give or take however many cups of tea you’re drinking.

Overall, despite the fact that I need more lip products like I need another article that references Clueless on my blog (i.e. I totally don’t but hell, I enjoy it), I really loved Shu Uemura’s Laque Supremes. Their texture and finish are totally different to anything in my stash (I believe they may be similar to YSL Lip Lacquers, but I’ve never tried any of those) – and that double whammy of pow-wow colour and wham-bam shine is pretty damn gorgeous.

In fact, I think I really need a red to round off my Shu Uemura Laque Supreme collection… don’t you?!

Shu Uemura Laque Supreme, $230; see all Shu Uemura locations in Hong Kong here

Note: I received these products for my consideration