I Tried The $18 Lip Treatment That's All Over Facebook And I'm Not OK

I need to get something off my chest.

I'm the person who scrolls past every "miracle product" on Facebook. I don't buy things from ads or click sponsored posts. When I see "women are going crazy for this" I keep scrolling because I've been burned enough times to know better.

So when this little gold lip device started showing up in every Facebook group I'm in, I ignored it for three weeks.

I should tell you where my lips were before any of this.

Last June I got ready for my niece's wedding. I put on my favourite lipstick, the red one I'd been wearing since my early 30s. I checked the mirror once before leaving. Looked fine.

By the time I got to the reception the colour had bled into every line above my lip. I could see it in the bathroom mirror under those fluorescent lights and I just stood there staring at it. I spent ten minutes trying to clean up the edges with a tissue. Then I wiped it all off and walked back out with bare lips.

That was the last time I wore colour.

I'm 44. I started overdrawing my lip liner at 41 because the border of my lips had faded so much that liner couldn't find an edge to follow. By 43 I'd stopped wearing lipstick entirely because every colour I owned ended up in the lines within an hour.

I looked into fillers once. Got as far as the pricing page online. $600 per syringe, maintenance every four to five months. I closed my laptop and never went back.

Then my sister called me on a Tuesday night.

She'd been using something for two weeks and her husband Mark asked her if she'd gotten injections. My sister doesn't exaggerate. She returns things she likes just because the shipping was slow. If she's calling me about a beauty product at 10 PM, something happened.

She told me it was called the Glamory MicroLift System. $18 per treatment. A micro-infusion device with gold needles that pushes serum directly into your lips instead of letting it sit on the surface and wipe off.

I rolled my eyes. She said "just try it, there's a 30-day guarantee."

I ordered it before we hung up expecting to return it within the month.

Day 1: Showed up in three days. Smaller than I expected. A little glass vial with gold needles under a dome cap. You press it onto your lips and it creates tiny channels while pushing serum through at the same time. Five minutes before bed. I looked in the mirror after and my lips looked a little shiny but nothing else.

Day 3: The dryness in the corners of my lips was gone. They felt hydrated in a way that balm had never achieved. But I wasn't seeing anything dramatic and I started mentally composing my return email.

Day 5: I had the return page open on my phone. The guarantee is 30 days so I told myself I'd wait another week. I closed the tab and forgot about it.

Day 7: My coworker Lisa, who has never once commented on my appearance in four years of sitting three desks apart, stopped me in the hallway and said "your lips look good today, are you wearing a new lipstick?" I wasn't wearing any lipstick.

Day 10: I started seeing it myself. The border of my lips was pulling back into focus after years of fading.

Day 14: I stood in front of my mirror and pulled up a photo from Thanksgiving on my phone. Same bathroom, same lighting. I went back and forth between the photo and my reflection.

My hands started shaking.

The vertical lines above my lip that used to catch my lipstick every morning had softened. My lips were fuller in a way that looked natural, like someone had quietly given me back three years.

I picked up my red lipstick. The one from the wedding. Put it on without liner for the first time since I was 41. It didn't bleed. It sat on my lip border like it used to.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and cried. I texted my sister a selfie with no caption and she wrote back "TOLD YOU."

Here's why I'm not OK.

I'm not OK because I spent hundreds of dollars on lip plumpers that were just capsicum burning my lips for an hour and calling it results.

I'm not OK because I looked at fillers online, saw the $600 price tag, and walked away thinking there was nothing in between lip gloss and injections.

I'm not OK because only 5% of what you put on your lips gets past the surface. Published research showed micro-infusion increases collagen production by up to 400%. Clinics have been charging $500 a session for this while I was buying plumpers that couldn't get past the outside of my lips.

I'm not OK because the MicroLift does the same thing for $18 per treatment. The 6-pack I ordered was $108 for six months. Less than sixty cents a day. A single filler syringe costs $600 and dissolves in four months. Three years of this for the price of one injection that your body breaks down before summer.

It has existed this entire time and nobody told me.

Three weeks in, my husband looked at me while I was getting ready for bed and said "did you do something to your lips?"

We've been married 16 years. He didn't notice when I painted the kitchen.

He noticed my lips.

I don't write reviews. I'm writing this one because I know there's a woman reading this right now who is exactly where I was a month ago. Scrolling past everything. Telling herself nothing works because nothing has ever worked.

I was that woman. I almost didn't order it. I had the return page open on day 5.

My lips haven't looked like this in years. My lipstick doesn't bleed anymore. My husband noticed before I told him anything.

There's a 30-day guarantee called "Love Your Lips or It's Free." You're not risking anything except five minutes before bed.

Your lips lost collagen while you read this. The link is below.

I'm still not OK about the fact that this costs $18.