Finding your best nude might actually require you get nude.
Dr. Travis Stork from daytime show “The Doctors” revealed on the boob tube recently that your perfect shade of nude lipstick may be the same color as your nipples.
We’re not going to pretend like we didn’t immediately book it to the closest bathroom to investigate this theory. And from the looks of stories that have been written since, there does appear to be a pretty strong correlation between many lighter-skinned women’s nipples and nude shades that flatter them.
But not everyone is convinced. Celebrity makeup artist Kari Bauce simply told HuffPost, “Ew, and that’s dumb,” and makeup artist Elisa Flowers explained to Refinery29 that a number of factors, including the fact that “the color or your lips and nipples will change with heat, cold and blood flow, not to mention hormone levels,” make this “more of a loose guide rather than a rule to follow.”
On top of that, many people have pointed out on Twitter and in comments that this trick doesn’t really work well for dark skin tones. “As a black woman. No. Just no,” one Youtube commenter wrote.
This tit-alizing topic goes back at least to 2015, when Marci Robin at XOJane tackled the theory. She called upon her coworkers to give it a spin, confirming that while nipple-matching shades worked on some of her colleagues, they did not work for those with darker skin tones.
Sigh. The search for the perfect nude lip continues.