BALMS AWAY

New products deliver enhanced lip service.

- CHLOE SCHAMA

When my daughter was born a few years ago, I wondered if, as the mother of three boys, I would unleash all my pent-up female energy on her, imposing a set of gender norms that she'd immediately rebuff. Rebuff them she did not. “Me too, mama!” she demands in the mornings, perched on the bathroom counter, reaching for my lipstick. Children are who they are, and my littlest one—with her fascination for anything used to adorn, enhance, or decorate the body—is no different.

But what to share with her? I didn’t want to mottle her perfect skin with my cheek stain; she didn’t need mascara—she was already a walking Kewpie doll! Thank goodness for the influx of tinted balms that started arriving at the Vogue office, seeming like ChapStick’s grownup cousins—gilded columns, squat metallic tubes, a curved Brancusi-like swoop of a canister—do-no-harm products with a purpose, but also a little flare. If she was going to be a beauty addict, these were okay gateway drugs, I figured.