Why must we spell Pink with three "i"s, unless we're working in roman numerals? Why, also, must I discover, upon landing at Sephora's website that the price point for my bad, bad impulse buy has just been lowered, making at least a third of my original critique totally obsolete?

Why, again, did I buy this lip balm, anyway?

I'm 26, after all, and just because I have a weakness for sparkley things does not justify the purchase of a $7 lip balm (now $4) whose packaging looks like it was made for a tweenager who carries her lip glosses in a hot pink faux leather slingbag and applies it in front of a foggy mirror at the roller-rink which smells of rubber and stale popcorn.

This impulse buy, rationalized by my desire to bring you a diversity of lip balm reviews, was also a near-necessity as I found myself at the mall, lips totally parched, and my handbag totally without lip lubricant. Piddle! What I should have done was seek out the CVS on the first floor of the mall - which I think is such a clever and useful inclusion among the mall's occupants, and one which I believe was once a staple in malls (because my mother would buy us candy in the mall drugstore and then smuggle it into the mall movie theatre) once upon a time - and there I should have purchased your basic chapstick for $2.99 to get me through my shopping venture. But no! I had to surrender to the love of the sparkle.

And at this point, I love not even the sparkles, let me tell you.

Sephora brand lip shiiine has brought my cosmetic case nothing but a stickly saline-like mess. I'm not sure if I just squeezed this tube incorrectly and capped it too abruptly and am therefore plagued by that Lip Gloss Under Pressure volcanic eruption everytime I uncap, but this stuff is oozey. It spurts out way too rapidly and the tube, which is kind of waxy, is somehow terribly sticky and quite unpleasant to hold. I had placed it in a plastic bag within said cosmetic case, but now, due to glossy diffusion, the entire bag is a mucky, saline-like mess.

The shine that this gloss provides is quite nice, but not worth the effort of mucking up your hands. The smell is not bad, truth be told. I should probably research what kind of artificial colors and flavors are to credit for this nice smell, but I am far from a scientist, merely a lip balm afficionado, sweet dears, and let me conclude that my affections do not run sticky fingers over Sephora Lip Shiiine.