On Tuesday, July 7, Rare Beauty quietly answered the question that has hovered over every summer makeup bag: what if a lip oil behaved itself? The Soft Pinch Lip Oil Stick, $25, arrives in eight shades at Sephora, Ulta, and rarebeauty.com, and it takes the brand’s cult tinted lip oil, one of the most reached-for formulas of the past few years, and pours it into a solid bullet. The pitch is disarmingly simple. Selena Gomez wanted the comfort of an oil, the shine of a gloss, and the payoff of a lipstick, minus the doe-foot, the stickiness, and the mirror.
Gomez has described her brief in plainly sensorial terms, saying she wanted a formula as smooth as a lip oil that still delivers “real, juicy color in one swipe.” That single swipe is the whole thesis. The stick glides on like a balm, reads like a lipstick, and, according to the brand’s testing, keeps its color and its hydration for up to eight hours.
The shade range is calibrated for actual wardrobes rather than campaign imagery: bright coral Wish, mauve Dream, nude beige Muse, warm brown Embrace, red orange Success, violet pink Bloom, deep berry Fortune, and deep cool brown Journey. The dermatologist-tested formula leans on apple seed oil to lock in moisture and support the lip’s natural barrier, joined by a blend of nourishing oils and finished with a light, fresh apple scent that reads more orchard than candy.
What the glossy launch imagery does not show is how close this product came to not existing in its current form. In a behind-the-scenes conversation published by the brand, Rare Beauty’s product development team revealed that the original formula had to be scrapped halfway through development: once production scaled up, the sticks hardened within hours, forming a matte outer shell that had to be broken through to reach the glossy oil beneath. “You shouldn’t need instructions for a lip oil,” as Chief Brand Officer Joyce Kim put it, and the team rebuilt the formula and stress-tested every single one of the eight shades before signing off.
Early testers suggest the trouble was worth it. Editors who wore the sticks ahead of launch describe a texture that feels like a hydrating balm but builds like a proper lipstick, with pigment that surprises on the first pass. The mauve Dream drew praise as an effortless desk-to-dinner shade, while dry-lipped wearers found Muse gave a polished lift without any of the usual tugging. The lone quibble, that the bullet’s width sacrifices a little precision at the lip line, is easily solved with a liner, which the brand clearly anticipated: the launch arrives alongside five new shades of the Kind Words Matte Lip Liner.
The timing is shrewd. The hybrid lip category, where skincare comfort meets makeup payoff, is the defining lip conversation of this decade, and the Soft Pinch name itself carries the credibility of the liquid blush that became one of the most viral beauty products of the 2020s. In the brand’s independent consumer study, 98 percent of testers said the stick delivered nourishment, shine, and color in a single swipe, and, as with everything Rare Beauty sells, one percent of annual sales supports the Rare Impact Fund. For a product born of a scrapped formula and a stubborn vision, it lands looking remarkably inevitable.
