NEW YORK, June 9 — You can’t spend five minutes on TikTok without discovering a beauty tip promising to revolutionise your day-to-day routine. Yet it’s not a tip or a hack that’s currently buzzing on the Chinese social network, but rather a lipstick shade, dubbed ‘Cherry Cola Lips’ in reference to a famous sparkling drink. The shade has become the star of the summer, fuelled by no less than 2.5 million views.

How can a simple shade of lipstick become a social media star? This might have seemed incomprehensible a few years ago, but that all changed when TikTok came along. As a result, a shade that was relatively unknown just a few months ago — inspired by the shimmering tones of a soda — is now considered the ultimate, if not indispensable, shade for a stylish summer. And this is all the more surprising at a time when enthusiasm for lipstick has waned following the widespread use of face masks and the rise of natural beauty.

Over 60 million views

Whether it’s the famous soda or the lipstick shade, the words ‘Cherry Cola’ are currently running wild on social media, with no fewer than 64 million views on TikTok. Through this hashtag, users can find numerous tutorials entirely dedicated to lip makeup, detailing different ways — gloss, pencils, lipsticks, or a combination of all three — to achieve the coveted shade. And that’s not all, since the #CherryColaLips hashtag has racked up over 2.5 million views to date, with several beauty bosses — including the famous makeup artist Huda Kattan — having already tried and tested this tasty new shade.

As you’ll have gathered, there are no specific tips for this beauty trend, apart from determining exactly what the shade looks like, and perhaps concocting it from other colours that might already be in your kit — in other words, without having to source it directly. The ‘Cherry Cola’ shade is essentially a bright, vibrant red that gradually turns darker red, then brown, like the colour of the fruity soda. In her video, Huda Kattan first uses a brown lip pencil, which she applies around the contour and gently blends over the edge of the lips. She then finishes with a matte red lipstick to fill in the lips, before adding a final stroke of brown pencil to accentuate the ‘Cola’ effect. But techniques vary from user to user, the idea being simply to recreate the viral shade as best as possible.

There’s nothing revolutionary about using brown lip liner — as anyone already doing their makeup in the 1990s can testify. However, back then, the idea was to combine a brown contour with a transparent gloss, and not such a vibrant lipstick colour. So, are bold colours back, or is it just this soda-inspired shade? The answer is probably a bit of both, especially as the shade hasn’t just made its mark in the world of makeup. In fact, it could also become the star hair colour as we head into summer, this time dubbed #CherryCokeHair and with some 20 million views and counting on the Chinese social network. — ETX Studio