I can’t be the only one seeing Glossier ads all over my Facebook feed. Those videos of dewey-skinned young lovelies applying their skincare products and popular lip balms were too much for this beauty product fan to resist!
So in our latest installment of Damn You, Social Media Ads, in which we buy the stuff that’s appearing in all of our Facebook feeds and give you the real scoop, I ordered a trio of the Glossier lip balms/universal salves to see if they were all that.
Updated for 2024
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I was drawn in by the Birthday Balm Dotcom Salve (actual name), created in partnership with foodie favorite Milk Bar and scented like their extraordinary Birthday Cake truffles. But, thanks to some very savvy website upselling, I ended up sucked into the “TRY THREE GLOSSES FOR LESS!” offer for a Balm Dotcom Trio, and ordered the Rose and Mint balms too.
Related: 7 amazing beauty products that anyone at all can wear to maximize what you already own.
Here’s what I think about them.
That Awesome Packaging
The packaging and branding of Glossier all around is just wonderful, and surely a huge part of the appeal. Everything comes delivered in an adorable #girlboss pink box that makes you feel like you’re part of a special club, complete with a few free samples, cute stickers and some de rigeur inspirational quotes about smiling and inner beauty.
Oh, and hashtags. Because, Instagram or it didn’t happen.
Note that since this review was first posted, there have been some packaging changes and reports that fewer stickers are coming with the boxes.
The website reminds you the lip-smacking 11-year-old in you is freaking out right now. Collect them all! So they’re definitely tapping into that longing for our former happy (hopefully) innocent childhoods, like the trends of unicorn makeup and the My Little Pony, Hello Kitty, Super Mario, and Disney cosmetics for adults we recently featured.
The Glossier box itself delivers before you’ve even opened it. It’s like receiving a love letter that says, “we love you, millennials and we love your free spirit, ownership of your femininity, and disposable income!” And d’oh…it works. Because it looks so cool, it’s the kind of box you keep around for no reason, thinking to yourself, I know I can reuse this for something…
No surprise that brands like Olive & June soon followed suit.
So does the idea of being “A Glossier Girl” appeal to you? Then let’s open those boxes and get to the products.
Glossier Balm Dotcom: How It Works
To my surprise (and I should have read the fine print better) these are less lip glosses, and more of a “universal lip balm and skin salve” formulated for bits beyond lips. It’s a great option for cuticles, or weird little dry patches that crop up in the winter.
But honestly, everything about them screams LIP GLOSS including the little squeeze tube, and the wonderful scents. Oh, and the brand name: GLOSSIER that’s splashed across glistening, GLOSSY lips. So you can forgive my misunderstanding — in fact, they’re now found on the site under the categories for Skincare, Makeup, and Balms.
I blame my mistake on the social media ads, frankly.
The Scents
If you like scented products, I think these are truly nice. The vanilla of the Birthday Cake Balm is fairly sweet (probably why my tween daughters begs me to use it all the time), and the Rose balm and Mint balm each have discernible but not-too-strong scents that I like a lot. They’re all well-formulated scents though, so rest easy, you’re not getting like a Yankee Candle Vanilla.
The lip balms also come in some newer flavors — my daughter likes the fruit scents, like the jammy new Wild Fig balm, and you prefer herbal over fruity smells, there’s a new Lavender balm that’s a huge hit. Plus, limited editions are always released, like the Hot Cocoa, available during the holidays.
The Ingredients
In 2024, The Glossier ingredient list has gone vegan to include natural plant and fruit extracts, beeswax (now synthetic), seed oils, castor jelly — no parabens, and still not animal-tested. They even eliminated petrolatum, formerly the first ingredient on the list. No doubt they wanted to keep pace with natural beauty brands like Korres and Burt’s Bees.
The Results
As for efficacy of the actual Glossier Balms: to be honest, my first thought was…eh. Really.
I called Kristen and said, “I tried the Glossier balms and…eh.”
They’re not high-gloss like my go-to fave Fenty Beauty Gloss Bomb, but then, not waxy like a Burt’s Bees balm. If anything, I could best compare them to longstanding cult-favorite C.O. Bigelow’s Rosebud Salve. But then a funny thing happened.
They grew on me!
I found myself reaching for them all the time — one on my nightstand for dry winter lips, one in my bag for lips or cuticles. There was something about those scents that just kept bringing me back!
That said, the one place I think was a little disappointed was the promise of “subtle shimmer” in the Birthday Balm and the “barely-there pink tint” of the Rose. If by “subtle” and “barely-there” they mean “no perceptible color or shimmer whatsoever, then…nailed it!
Here’s what I mean:
(Note that I once love that Mally Gloss but it’s no longer available.)
As you can see bove, there’s an imperceptible difference between the “tinted” rose balm and the untinted mint balm.
For comparison sake, Fenty Beauty offers far more shine and a little shimmer in an apricot shade; and Mally’s Chinatown offers a little more shimmer, a little less slick shine, in a pinker shade.
In the spirit of their brand claim that “celebrates real girls,” here’s the result on my bare, no-makeup, 40-something, real-and-not-a- professional-model skin. (Sigh, the things I do for you all.)
I’ve got no other color on my lips besides the different balms and glosses; look closely and you can see that Glossier is not the one you want for a noticeable shine — it really is more of a balm or salve. And it’s definitely not the one you want for color, as you can see in comparison with the other two glosses, though their own impact is amplified when I use it over lip color.
But there are other benefits….so read on.
Glossier Lip Balms: The Price
$14 a tube is a little spendy, but it’s relative. For comparison sake, Rosebud Salve in a tubeis $7 for 0.5 oz and Fenty Beauty Gloss Bomb is $21 for 0.3 oz (both at Sephora), while Burt’s Bees lip balms are around $2-3 for 0.6 oz at pharmacies everywhere.
I you can’t resist the Balm Dotcom Trio like me, you do save six bucks, making them $12 each — a little more reasonable. You also get free shipping on orders over $40 so that’s a plus — but it also means you have to order more than just the trio. That wasn’t the case when they first launched.
Glossier Lip Balms: The Bottom Line.
Once I got over my misperception of what the Glossier Balms were all about, I really started to like them. A lot. They feel nice and natural, without any slickness or goopiness. Now in my experience, they don’t deliver on the original promise of “an ultra dewy sheen.” But what they do deliver on are claims of conditioning, soothing, long-lasting moisture, smells great. So if those sound like things you want in a lip product, you may have found your love match.
When considering whether I should recommend any beauty product, my one-and-only most important factor is, “do I reach for it again?” In other words, do I think about it when it’s out of sight? Do I drop it into my bag when I’m heading out? Do I grab it instead of a comparable product?
Turns out the answer to all these questions is yes.
The real benefit and point-of-difference (besides the great branding) are definitely the nicely formulated scents.
Which means slowly and a little reluctantly…wow. I’ve really come to like the Glossier Balms. Just not in the way I was expecting.
You can find the Glossier Balm Dot Com products as singles or in a trio through the Glossier site. Got any social media ads that are calling your name and you want us to try the product out for you? Leave a comment here and maybe we’ll do just that!
Other reviews in our “damn you social media ads” series, in which we buy and try the products
showing up in all of our social feeds:
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