Why People Are Splurging on This $88 Lipstick

Fara Homidi calls herself a “mouth watcher.” The makeup artist has always loved observing people talk, smile, laugh. Do their lips quiver when they talk about a certain someone? What do their teeth look like? She finds that people display a lot of personality with their mouths. So when she decided to launch her first makeup line this year, she knew it had to be lip-focused.

What she didn’t know was that her $88 sky-blue lip compact would become an immediate object of desire. The refillable metal compact, which includes a lip balm and a colored pigment, comes in just two nudes and two reds. Homidi also sells a $36 lip pencil, a $58 lip brush and a $298 pouch. There’s more on the horizon—she wants to play on the same field as fellow artists Charlotte Tilbury and Pat McGrath, both of whom have built billion-dollar businesses. But for now, all the hype is swirling around that one shiny blue lip compact.