Nude lipstick is the hardest shade category to buy remotely, because it is the one where your own lip colour contributes the most and where the marketing photograph is least likely to survive contact with a real face.
Maison Ivory’s 07 is the first in a long time we would recommend without a caveat about who it suits — and with a substantial caveat about how it is sold.
The shade
Not rosewater. Rosewater implies a pale, cool, slightly pink neutral, and this is a mid-depth mauve-taupe with a clear grey component. On the website it is photographed on fair skin under bright light and looks like a barely-there pink; in the bullet it is visibly deeper and browner.
That grey is why it works. Most nudes fail on one of two axes: too pink, and they read as frosted on warm or deep skin; too orange, and they turn muddy on cool skin. A neutral shade with a little grey in it sidesteps both, because grey lowers the chroma and stops the undertone from taking over.
We swatched it across five people, fair to deep. On fair cool skin it read as a soft mauve. On mid-warm skin, a proper beige-rose. On deep skin, a warm brown-toned nude that still looked like a deliberate colour rather than a concealer. Five for five is not something we have written about a nude before.
The formula
Soft matte, which in this case means a genuine matte finish with enough emollient left in it that the first application does not drag on a lip that is not perfectly smooth.
Six hours of wear with a coffee and a lunch, and at the end of it a slightly diffused edge rather than a ring. No tightness. There is settling into lip lines after about four hours, which is the price of the matte and is largely avoidable with a thin balm underneath and a five-minute wait.
The bullet is slanted, which sounds like packaging trivia and is the reason it applies to a clean edge without a liner. A slanted bullet gives you a point for the corners and a flat for the body of the lip; a rounded one gives you neither.
What we would change
The name, and the photograph. There is a version of this product’s page that shows the shade honestly on three or four skin tones, and it would sell more of them, because the people who would love this are the ones currently scrolling past a picture of a pale pink they know will vanish on them.
That is a marketing failure sitting on top of a genuinely good product, and it is the only reason this is not a five-star review.
