Trinny Woodall has made herself quite the human guinea pig for midlife beauty solutions, tenaciously trialling fixes for everything from sagging necks to menopausal redness. Her latest mission finds the Trinny London founder tackling the issue of ageing lips – inspired by her own experiences. Spoiler: not all good.
GH is meeting with Trinny to talk through her new Trinny London Lip Reset Kits, which each contain a perfectly-paired plumping lip oil and liner to take the fear out of wearing lip colour. Ostensibly, it’s a chat about midlife makeup, but as with all things Trinny, the talk quickly turns personal.
‘Resting b*tch face is a thing with lips,’ she tells us. ‘My daughter Lyla says to me, “What’s wrong, Mummy?” and I’m like this [pulls downturned-mouth face]. I’m feeling quite happy, but I look like I’m p*ssed off.’
‘So with Lip Reset, we have a little trick for that, which shows where you put the liner so it doesn’t drag your face down. You don’t want to take the lip pencil to the outer ends of the lips. If you do, you are widening your mouth, and then it will make your mouth go down more.’
Beyond combatting ‘resting b*tch face’, Trinny just wants older women to feel confident embracing lip colour again. ‘A lot of women stop wearing a lip,’ she laments. ‘They think, “My lip pigment has gone”. They feel their lips are uneven. Probably the issue I hear most from women is, “I don’t have a top lip”. And they don’t want to do lip filler, they just want something that they can put on and feel they can wear a lip again.’
Speaking of filler, we have to ask Trinny – who is remarkably plump of pout at 62 – whether injectables are part of her own current arsenal for lip confidence. ‘Oh no. I don’t. This is me,’ she says, imploring us to look at old photos as proof that she’s always been full-lipped. ‘People go, “Trinny, you’ve had lip filler” and I’ll go, “No”.’
As she puts it, ‘I have big lips, and I’ve always had big lips.’ In fact, she’d rather they were smaller these days. ‘About 15 years ago, I had my teeth really expanded outwards,’ she says. ‘I had bonding and veneers to widen my smile. I actually feel sometimes my lips are too big, because when I smile, I get my teeth caught in the sides. I should have shaved my teeth down now. But if I shaved my teeth down, my lips would fall in, so I don’t know what I’d prefer.’
While blessed with naturally full lips, Trinny has previously dabbled with lip refinements. (She has ‘quite deep’ lip lines, she tells us.) It's a sore topic, since she’s been literally scarred by past experience with a different type of filler to the ones we know today. (Which she’s never used, she says.)
‘Before I had my teeth done, I had CO2 laser and a little lip filler,’ she says. ‘And then when I had my teeth done, I got them to cut it out. Because it was a very old-fashioned filler that became hard. I have scars from when I had it cut out. It’s maybe 15 years ago. I still feel there are scars there that I can’t get rid of. But that’s fine. That’s life.’
These days she’s content to pamper her lips via a £190 Current Body lip LED gadget (‘the one you suck on like a dummy’) and also the ingredients in her Lip Reset liner and oil, which help her lip lines. ‘I do plump up from that extra layer around my mouth, because it has so much peptide and hyaluronic acid in it,’ she says.
Her lines also get smoothed over with a dab of her excellent Miracle Blur and an occasional tweakment. ‘I have a little Botox here in my lip line to help that,’ she says. ‘It's really painful to do, and I don’t love it.’
Finally, her own lip reset is down to technique, and working with a changing lip texture. ‘I put the liner on exactly the shape of my lip, and in the middle, I go straight across. If you emphasise your Cupid’s bow, you actually emphasise the lines more,’ she says. ‘When you’re older, it’s better to build the base of the whole lip with liner, then put a gloss colour on top. You create this very beautiful, sexy mouth when you do that.’
Trinny’s favourite Lip Reset kits
For everyday, I will do Fran and Thea. And then when I want to do a strong lip, I do a deeper shade, not a bright lip as often. So, I’ll do Alessia and Lyla, which is this plummy shade. If I'm wearing jeans, I love that look.
