How to Wear Age-Appropriate Lip Makeup

Subtle color is sometimes all you need!

Just as teens sometimes wish they could look older, there are adults in their mature years who yearn to look half their age. The lip color and texture you choose greatly influences what age you appear to be. Look your age--as well as younger or older--with these tips on wearing lip makeup that becomes you at any age.

Instructions

1. Focus less on color, more on protection in your early teens and younger. Colored cosmetics are unnecessary and even unattractive on your lips at this age. Stick with an SPF clear lip balm, or one with a sheer tinted if you have pale lips.

2. Transition into your mid to late teens with lip gloss. If you are only beginning to wear makeup, start with a light coat of clear lip gloss. As you get used to wearing it, you can add sheer hues to your palette. Eventually, you can experiment with more textured formulas such as shimmer, metallic and full-color finishes.

3. Increase the pigmentation of your lip color in your twenties. Light to midtone lipsticks make the most of your youthful beauty without the frivolity sometimes associated with gloss. Lipsticks in spunky shades like watermelon, cranberry and raspberry add depth to your look without bogging you down as darker colors would.

4. Match your lip makeup to the requirements of a perhaps more professional lifestyle in your thirties and forties. Working women look best in lip colors that don't compete for attention on the job. Unless you are in a creative and artistic profession where anything goes, your best bet are lipsticks which complement your coloring and make you look beautiful without drawing the focus to themselves. Wear your midtone browns, roses and subdued reds to the office. Save your goth purples and neon oranges for nighttime parties and clubbing.

5. Find moisturizing formulas that hydrate lips and restore their elasticity in your fifties and beyond, if you haven't already begun using them. Make your lips look healthy with creamy lipsticks. Go back to glossy formulas, as long as you keep the color soft and in no way severe or shocking. With the shrinking and wrinkling that comes with advanced years, you may want to use restorative lip creams on a daily basis, even if you have no makeup on.

Tips & Warnings

• Wear SPF on your lips not only during your youth, but all throughout your life.

• Match the finish you wear to the occasion you are attending. Lipstick may not be appropriate for a very young teen, but were she to attend a somber event like a funeral, a very light lipstick that merely enhances her own lip color is certainly preferable to a shiny loud gloss.

• True red is a shade you can make an exception for even when working at a conventional office job. It's a classic shade that's been around for a very long time.