Lipliners :

1) this one is an American brand, NYX. We can find it in dm and in Müller. It's the most expensive one out of the 4. It's a light brown in the shade Cocoa. It glides pretty nicely and doesn't smell like crayons, but it is what it is, a pencil. I always have to warm it up on the back of my hand and (this is my fault for not choosing one shade darker), it doesn't really line my lips in the way I want it. It gives me a very nude, Kylie Jenner kind of effect. It is not my aesthetic tbh (I like a more sharper contrast) but I appreciate it as my true nude lip liner colour. If I found a lipstick in the exact same shade, I would buy it because I have always wanted a nude coloured lipstick.

2) This is by probably the most popular brand in Germany (because it is home-grown), essence. It's the soft & precise lip pencil in the darkest shade 420. It is a really dark, warm toned purple that reminds you of the 90s and literally begs to be paired with a concealer colour lippie for the aesthetic LOL. It was not the cheapest out of the 4, but for the price, it gives you what it's worth. It is anything but soft and also nowhere near to precise (you need to keep on mending it!) But the colour is dark and rich and pigmented. For essence's standards, who rarely cater to dark skinned people, this is great. The lipstick shade that comes with it is also very pigmented and dark, but I haven't bought it.

3) The most recent and probably the best quality, the trend it up glide and stay lipliner in the shade 090. The brand is dm's in house cosmetics brand, and they offer a vey good quality for the peice.It is also a brown, but a tad darker than NYX, but it's a retractable liner and not a pencil. It cost 3 euros, and I feel like I discovered it way too late. It's fantastic. It glides super well, I don't need to warm it up on thr back of my hand, it comes with an in-built sharpener, and it is super precise. It stays on real neat, but it does fade a little bit after a few hours. I feel like trend it up is very underrated, they have a wide variety of items that are pretty unique, like a 3 in 1 rouge stick, or a creme-to-powder foundation, or a brown colored and blue coloured mascara (Most of the brands only have black mascaras). Too bad that most of their base products are too light for me...

4) The last one and the most cheapest one is by Rival ♡ Me, one of Rossmann's in-house brands. It's the lipliner in colour 07. They are dirt cheap and also lag behind the others in quality. I mean, it does what it should do, but doesn't really do it well. It is a dark purple that actually leans towards dark pink, and it is a pencil type too. It applies a bit weirdly because it really feels like an actual colour pencil so you have to warm it up, and do multiple passes/strokes to get to the colour you want. But for 95 cents... thr pigment is there and it does what it's supposed to do. I can't conplain. I would rather have the dirt cheap brands have BGF options than the high end things sothat young middle class girls can enter the world of makeup without worrying about throwing their money away at the one Sephora in gwon

I had another brown lip liner, it was Maybelline's Color Sensational Lipliner either in colour 630 or 775. It Was a light coffee brown shade and I temember that it was pretty good too. It was my first brown lip liner, hehe. But I don't remember the exact shade ans don't remember if I had to warm it up or so, I think I lost it somewhere in a friend's house.

If I had to rank them, it would go : trend it up (quality colour price) > NYX (shade range) > essence (colour) > rival.

As for the lippies in Pic two, this is my current everyday collection (plus a few more products products I will also mention).

1) the essence water tints. As you can see I have two of them. It's called a dupe for the benetint/Etude House water tint, but since I have never tried the Etide House tint, and I will be forever too broke to spend 21 DAMN EUROS on a bottle of lip tint, I can't say much about that. But that is the reason it's sold out almost everywhere you go I my city. But the Rossmann near me almost always has it. Nor many children/teenies/young adults live in my area, so there's less competition for the popular products lol.

Anyways, this colour is a neutral to cool toned pink on my lips, and it stains my lips for at least a day. I wear it under any lip product that I wear and oftentimes on its own, paired with the brown lip liner. I have two toned lips and it doesn't stain my upper lip like it does my lower lip. You have to wooly multiple coats - but careful, if you apply too much it will settle like a film. Depending on your skin tone it might look like a very brighter darker pink, but on me I think it's okay.

2) My first item from a Pride Month collection was this, a "lip balm" from Catrice called Love Yourself. I don't identify on the spectrum, but it's the year of the lord 2024, queer people still face discrimination even here in Germany, I am a student of computer science whose "founding father" Alan Turing was gay, and we support what we gotta support, yknow.

The reason why I put lip balm in quotations is because it's SO. DAMN. PIGMENTED. They should have called it a lip stick in a balm tube. It is a warm tone red that actually does lean orange, you blend it out it's still red. I'm sure it would look even more red on people with skin lighter than me. I don't like that there is no applicator, it's just...a squeeze tube. It looks like a glue applicator and you have to apply it with your fingers, a brush or some other thing (I am actually planning to buy one of those round silicone lippie applicators from Müller because of this). It dries down/fades and leaves a bright, light red stain, and it is really protecting/ hydrating and doesn't transfer (but only after you let it dry down for a bit).

3) this is again one of the unique products from trend it up, a serum care stick. Now it is basically a lipstick, with a shiny finish, very pigmented, with a lot of nourishing ingredients in it that you usually find in lip balms. The color is a muted warm red, and this is not even the darkest shade, there is a deep purple too! There is also a shade that could pass as a nude shade for the slightly lighter skinned brown girls.

It even smells good, and you can apply as much as you want and it won't make a difference in colour. One swipe is enough, imo. It does feel like a heavy lipbalm or lightweight lipstick although the product advertised that it feels like " a glass of water" on the lips. It doesn't lol. It's still a product made with wax and fats.

4) Last bit not least, the Balea Intensive Lip balm. It is dm's brand, again. It has a nice smell and can be used in the winter too, has no colour but isn't too heavy/waxy. Use it under your lip makeup without any thoughts.

As lipgloss, I use the essence Juicy Bomb in the purple colour. It is imo the perfect lipgloss for me, because it helps to slightly darken/neutralize my lip looks. It is very cheap and probably every Germans girls first lipgloss.

I did own the transparent/colourless one in the glass bottle (extreme shine volume lipgloss, shade 01?) too, but I ruined it by not cleaning the applicator, and the trying to follow one of the beauty hacks on YouTube Shorts where you mix eyeshadow with transparent lipgloss to get the colour. It separated very quickly and became chunky, so I threw it away.

I also owned Essence's "lip oil" but that was one hell of a flop show. You were basically paying for the lip gloss but repackaged. It didn't matter which coliur you chose, it wouldn't show up either way. Literally 3 shades of white lol.

Alverde's lip oil that they released somewhere last year in May was pretty cute. It was very lightweight, very flowery, had a pretty scent, and didn't stick. It was what I imagined a lip oil to be. It did mix with every lip product that I applied, so how much ever I tried to clean the applicator it got dirty, so I mixed it with a drop of blush to get some colour. And by the time I was done with the product they removed it from the stores T.T

So because this post is getting too long, I'll just quickly list some other (discontinued hehe) products that either me or my mother use (or used to use)

1) Revlon Black Cherry lipstick, they were available at Rossmann some few 6 to 7 years back but then got taken out. She still hss the lipstick though. This is my mom's holy grail and she is a 70s baby so it's understandable she stuck with the dark lip look of the 90s. I am more of a dark lipliner combo girlie... so there goes.

2) Maybelline Color Sensational Satin in 295 Peppercorn Blast. This is serious childhood/teenage memories because my mom loved it and I naturally did too, I used to steal it all the time. I really want to find it again and use it properly.

3) Rival de loop, some lipstick in the shade 01. It's is a purple brown and... you guessed it, belongs to my mom. She hasn't been able to let the 90s go lol.

4) My first ever lipstick was a lipstick pallette by alverde I had gotten for my 14th birthday by a family friend. It had 4 shades out of which 3 shades were used in the damn daily rotation. I'm so sad they discontinued it, but at least I still javelin it and can still try and use it.

5) If you're thinking about Lip balms, forget the cosmetic brand and go with Labello, Nivea or Balea. Those are actual high quality and easily beat out essence (I had their heart core lip balm), or any other beauty brand. Seriously. Long live Labello. These were also literal status symbols at my primary school. I remember it pretty well. I always used the transparent one or some blackberry something, because it was exactly the shade of my lips.

6) I do Indian traditional dance and it requires us to have very bright and expressive makeup for thr stage, as we have a lot of expressions and storytelling involved and every part of our face needs to be seen by the audience. As a lipstick, I need a bright red lipstick. I use the Manhattan lipstick in shade 400 Tangerina, it is an orangey red that is super duper pigmented and makes me look very bright and lovely on stage, and doesn't wash me out at all. I do use a black lip liner for this too, but that's again because stage makeup requires it for us.

So yeah, that was it! If yall want to see more stuff and stories from the German drugstore, more recommendations, have more brown girl friendly products, then write it down below! I'm looking forward to it!