Flashback Beauty Friday 79: Playboy Calendar Girl Lipstick

Post does not contain affiliate links or PR gifted items.

Last week, if you missed it, was the Yayoi Kusama illustrated Lancôme JT to celebrate 10 years of Juicy Tubes. I have quite a lot of images to get through today, so I'll get straight to it. 

Today, I have more from discontinued beauty brand Playboy, which was popular in the early Noughties. These are the Calendar Girl Lipsticks, described as a long lasting, highly pigmented formula with rich pearl finish. The first I bought was my own birthday month, Miss May. It's a purple toned pink, not a shade I'd usually go for, but I had faith in it being right for me! I don't know if the other colours here were a newer batch, but none of them seem to apply as well as Miss May. It's creamy, rich in colour, feels almost like a liquid lacquer, it's so highly pigmented. Obviously they are all really old now, but Miss May still has that glossy, creamy finish whereas some others are drier or more sheer. The shade sticker on the bottom is different to the others too (I remember buying it full price from ASOS), but the others I got discounted later when the brand was shutting down.

Anyway, they come in these bright pink, transparent plastic cases. Square when you're looking down on it with the round hole for the lipstick, which is pale gold with the Playboy bunny head sticking out the top (the twisty part is silver). The front of the casing has the gold bunny logo too. I've said before, that I surprisingly loved this line and actually really quite liked their packaging, but even more so the performance of their products.  The whole line was very cohesive in terms of packaging, with compacts and cases and boxes all very similar.  

The purple and pink boxes they come in have self coloured shade name stickers on the lid, however this would be my only gripe, the labelling of the actual lipsticks. They don't have the coloured stickers, just the shade name on the base of the pink case. So you have to be careful not to muddle the lipsticks once out of the cases, for example like here, when I'm photographing them all without their lids. I can't see anything on the actual lipstick to say which shade it is, so I had to be careful to put them back in the right case (I almost didn't actually). Also storage-wise, if you keep them out of their boxes, you wouldn't want to stand them on the bunny heads, so they all look the same and you'd have to pull each one out to check the shade on the bottom first-I prefer something where I can quickly glance and know which colour it is.  

Here's my swatches, all on bare arm with no edits (other than resizing) made to the photo.  All photos/swatches shown in the same order, February to December, left to right.  Miss February 105 and Miss March 106 are very similar to each other, both swatched and in the bullet. 105 has a slightly more orange tone to it than the tad cooler 106, but it's very slight. Both are tan-nudes. My most used is Miss May, it's half melted and broken, so I have to be very careful when using it as it's so delicate! Strangely this one doesn't have a shade number on the bottom and I no longer have the box. The purple tone is more prominent when looking at it, when swatched it's a cleaner pink, but a lot of shine to this one and bolder than it appears in the photo. Miss October 107, is one of the more sheer ones. It's a light salmon-pink with a soft champagne sheen to it that gives it an almost metallic finish. Miss November 68, my second most used, also has a sheer finish with a pretty gold micro-shimmer in the bullet. It's less apparent when swatched but again does have this sort of metallic type sheen. It's a rosy brown, the sheen appears pink when swatched, it's a sheerer version of Miss March. Miss December 108, is again slightly more sheer than the first three, though builds quicker than the last two. It's more pigmented than Miss October but similar in colour, that peachy-pink. It's more glossy with less of that metallic sheen. In the bullet it looks much more peachy than Miss October, which looks to be a pale pink.  February, March and May have absolutely no shimmer to them, the pinks all look brighter in real life than they photographed in my swatches.  

Do you remember this discontinued line or did you own any of these lipsticks?