This is a summer of gold!

I love gold in the summer.  I can be bronze gold, green gold, yellow gold, or cooler white gold.  A wash of gold looks good with minimal makeup and just adds a little shine to a hot day or warm night.

So last December, I jumped on the golden lip bandwagon with Bite Beauty’s Creme Lip Gloss in Gold.  I didn’t love it as much as I thought I would.

I usually want to wear gold for the winter holidays for warmth and glad tidings.  But this color didn’t work with my skin tone and it seemed too thick and sticky in the winter.  I didn’t consider it a lip topper at the time and really couldn’t see how to use it.  So I put it aside, especially after the holidays had come and gone.

Then when spring came this year, I was thinking about gold glosses and lip toppers and lipsticks of all sorts that were considered “gold” in one way or another.  Gilded, golden, anything like that.  Companies were launching bronzers and golden tan products.

As I said, I love golden summertime looks.  I dyed my hair blonde and started looking at gold makeup to complete my look.

I found two golden lipsticks from higher-end brands on Glambot, a used makeup site that I haunt frequently.  The Tom Ford lipstick was 1/2 price, so it was only $25.  Same with the Burberry.  I looked at them for about two weeks on the website and finally decided to buy them.

Tom Ford’s is a lip shimmer called Solar Gold 02.  Love that name.  The Burberry is a lip mist, which is an interesting idea, and is called Gold No. 217.  (I should be thankful I could read the bottom of the Burberry lipstick.   The writing is tiny and my eyes ain’t what they used to be.)  The two look very different, though.  Neither are opaque.  Neither have much pigment, relying primarily on shine to impart a sense of “gold.”

Here I’m wearing the Tom Ford Solar Gold.  Mostly shine.

The other one is about the same.

Ok. Not exactly what I was looking for in my summer of gold.

Next, I grabbed a gold lippie from Mac also on Glambot.  It’s a metallic called Digging for Gold.  (Pardon the blurry picture with the other two.  My camera was being ridiculous.) It’s more opaque than the others but still doesn’t have a lot of pigment.

The above three swatched on my pale-ass, old lady arm.  Top is Tom Ford, next is Mac, and finally Burberry.

They work best with a no-makeup makeup look, like the one I did for my husband’s birthday party.

Unless you want to wear them as a glossy topper for another color, but without much gold pigment or shimmer or flecks or glitter, these three impart little goldness.  Goldy-ness?

Sometimes…no, make that “usually,” I am looking for GOLD.  BIG GOLD!  Gold summertime eyes, lips, highlight.  Gold shimmer everywhere.  If we are going to wear gold, let’s wear GOLD.

And if you think you can’t wear it, don’t worry.  Yes, you can.

I did some golden homework to see what would work best–at least on my skin tone with my lovely Full Bloom, textured skin.  Feel free to modify any advice herein.

I revisited the Bite Beauty lip gloss.  I decided I could make it work.  I had to sheer it down, though, because it pulled so darn yellow on me, which made my teeth look strange.  (I didn’t even take a photo! Yikes.)  I mixed the Tom Ford with the gloss and found a nice combo.

Next up, I was looking for some good golden eyes.  Nope, no contacts to turn my brown eyes gold.  Eye shadow is what I had in mind.

Here I used a combo of browns, bronzes, and golds mainly from Colourpop.  I used Kathleen Lights Super Shock Shadow–a bronzy gold–and Nillionaire, which is an awesome shimmery gold.  It isn’t too hard to find great gold shadows.  Even glittery or shimmery shadows can work on older eyelids.  If you are concerned about wrinkles or texture, you can just use a spot of gold on the center of the lid or at the brow bone.  More or less, whatever your preference.  My preference is glowing to the skies and not giving a damn about texture.

Below is a monochromatic yellow gold eye look with a muted lip.  This look comes from Lorac’s Unzipped Gold palette.  Lorac’s palette has lovely, buttery bronze and gold shades to try.

This picture is from last golden summer.  I was concerned about mixing gold with grey hair, but I was pleased with the result, since the gold created a vivid contrast to the grey.  It’s a versatile color and can work on many skin tones.

I played with bronzers and highlighters for more golden summer looks.  As stated before, I am not concerned too much about texture or wrinkles.  I don’t mind showing off my “Full Bloom” face.  I don’t care if the bronzers or highlighters emphasize my age.  I’m completely fine with my age and my skin.  I am lived in.

Feel free to highlight to heaven.  Here, I’m using my very favorite Jaclyn Hill x Becca Champagne Pop.  The highlight is popping!  I added some Cover FX Custom Enhancer Drops in Celestial as a base for the Champagne Pop.  Great glowy combination.

 

One of my very favorite lip colors for summer is bronze gold.  I’m wearing it in the picture above with my sparkling highlight.  Below are two favorites, Milani Amore Metallics Lip Creme in Chromatic Addict and Jeffree Star Velour Liquid Lip in Pussywhipped.  Both have long-lasting, creamy, comfortable formulas.  Both dry down completely and are transfer-proof.

Below, I’m wearing Milani Chromatic Addict along with the Lorac Unzipped Gold palette.  I love this bronze-gold look.

Gold pairs well with other colors, too.  I experimented with rose-gold, green-gold, and purple-gold pairings, focusing on lip colors since that’s what I found in my collection.  Apparently, I like those colors…

Rose-gold has been very popular recently, and though I love the color, only specific rose-golds look good on me.

Lime Crime’s Happi is one I can wear.  I haven’t found too many others that fit with my complexion.

Green-gold is a fun dramatic look.  It might not work for every day, especially a green-gold lip.  But Ofra has a wearable bronze-gold-green lip color called Emerald City.  I wore it repeatedly to work and felt totally comfortable wearing it.  The Lip Tar by OCC Cosmetics in Derelict is too dramatic for me to wear every day.  But it is so pretty I want to wear it for an evening out, if I can stay awake that long.

I paired the two for a softer green-gold.

The combination of the Ofra Emerald City and Lip Tar in Derelict created this dark bronze that I would wear for a special occasion.

Purple and gold might seem like an odd combination, but they are two of my favorite colors.  Those were my colors when I got married.  I didn’t have any of the wonderful lip or eye products featured today back then.  I contented myself with purple and gold nail polish, which was fancy enough at the time.  I had rarely seen a true gold nail polish.

These days, with so many metallic lip and eye colors, gold and purple combinations abound.  Jeffree Star and Ofra have two nice metallic purples in No Tea, No Shade and Fantasia.

I also used Colourpop’s Nillionaire and Jeffree Star’s Beauty Killer palette for my eyes in these photos.

And last but not least, my golden summer includes a golden mani with a green accent nail on a purple background with gold trees!  I’m nothing if not completely color-matched.

I do believe that we at any age can wear gold either as a holiday color, or in my case, as a summer color.  In this post, I barely scratched the gilded surface of golden possibilities.  Every day, companies develop and launch new versions of this versatile color, some more shimmery, some less dramatic.  Lots of options exist and experimentation is always available.  Glambot sells used, sanitized makeup to try out for less cash and you can sell to them if you have makeup you don’t love.  Or if you buy something new and it doesn’t work, mix it, like I did with the Bite Beauty lip gloss.

Never say you are too old for gold.  Old gold is the best gold.

Affiliate link Glambot:  https://www.glambot.com?affid=7376rtgch