First Look: Cosmoholic Cosmetics

Growing up in Swampscott, Jody Cohen didn’t have to smuggle makeup past her mother. There were no covert eyeliner applications in the junior high bathroom, no sneaking out the door with a hand concealing technicolor lips, no borrowing of a best friend’s bright-pink Wet n Wild eyeshadow before first period.

No, Cohen was blessed with a makeup-artist mother—so she only got into trouble if she left the house without lipstick. Little surprise, then, that she grew up and decided to make lip-color a career. After stints doing makeup for the Today show and learning the retail ropes at Scoop NYC, Cohen returned to Boston to start her own line of lipstick/gloss hybrids.

She consulted with a chemist for more than a year—“I kept going back and asking for the formula to be less sticky” she says—before launching her Cosmoholic lip color this week. The prettily packaged wands are similar to other high-end liquid lipsticks, in that they pack the pigment of a ‘stick with the shine of a gloss. The shades are also neutrally typical (“mysteriously mocha” and “prudish pink,” with a “rock star red” tossed in for good measure).

But we do admit the non-stick factor is fairly unique. Cosmoholic goes on smoothly, like a deeply pigmented gloss, but without the tackiness of most heavy-duty glosses (MAC Lipglass, we’re looking at you.) And the color lasts for hours after the shine fades.

Mama Cohen must be proud.

Cosmoholic lipgloss, $22, available at Looc, Stil, and the Beauty Mark, cosmoholiconline.com.