Beauty Roundup: Kanebo's Rouge Star Drama, Mink's First Fragrances, CK's Smooth Berry Mist, and Dyson's Toothbrush With a Camera
Scent is doing a lot of the talking this week. Mink, the local body care brand you probably know for underarm and bikini serums, is launching perfumes. BW Women has a new hair mist that smells like the summer that the weather currently refuses to give us. Calvin Klein's viral body mists get a berry flavor. Kanebo drops a lipstick engineered to keep your lip line sharp. And Dyson, never one to make an ordinary appliance, has built a toothbrush with a camera in it. Let's get into it.
Kanebo's Rouge Star Drama is a lipstick that refuses to lose its shape
Kanebo's Rouge Star lipsticks have quietly built a following here since the brand set up shop at Mitsukoshi BGC, and the newest one, Rouge Star Drama (P2,434 on Shopee after vouchers) is now in the Philippines a little over a month after its Japan release. Where Rouge Star Vibrant is the glossy, plumping one and Rouge Star Breathe is the soft-matte blur, Drama's whole pitch is definition: a dense, sculpting texture that keeps the contour of your lips crisp as you talk, eat, and generally live your life.
The tech behind it is what Kanebo calls Dramatical Form Lasting Technology. A "sharp line powder" holds the edge, a color-fix oil gel keeps pigment locked on, and a dewy gloss fix gel is there so the shine doesn't slide off with the color. It's also built to be comfortable: sodium hyaluronate, jojoba seed oil, and Kanebo's own moisture compound keep it from turning into a drying long-wear situation. Early reviews out of Hong Kong describe it as balmy and almost tinted-balm-like in feel, with no visible lip lines even after seven hours, though the tradeoff is that it does transfer when you eat or drink. So: defined and hydrated, yes. Bulletproof, no.
The Philippines gets seven shades, D201 to D207, running from Melodious Beige and Soul Brown on the quiet end through Simple Red, Red with Love, Sophisticated Red, Royal Red, and Unconditional Red. (Kanebo does love a red.) Each has a hint of black-red pearl mixed into a "blood color" base, which is Japanese-beauty speak for reds that look like they belong on your face rather than sitting on top of it. If you're on the fence, D202 and D204 are the shades reviewers keep pointing to as the everyday picks.
Kanebo Rouge Star Drama Lipsticks are now available on Shopee, Lazada, TikTok Shop, Rustan's, and Landers, with 9.9 deals already running, and in person at Rustan's Makati, Shangri-La, and Cebu, plus the Mitsukoshi BGC boutique if you'd rather swatch first.
Mink is getting into fragrance
Mink is the local, cruelty-free body care brand that made a name for itself by being frank about the parts of the body most brands tiptoe around: underarms, bikini lines, inner thighs. Its Peek-ini Bikini Serum and PITSitivity underarm sets are the kind of products people recommend to each other in group chats rather than on billboards. So it's a slightly unexpected pivot to see the brand announce All Your Essence, its first fragrance collection.
There are four scents in the line, and Mink is keeping the notes under wraps until the launch itself, which is happening on TikTok LIVE via @minkphbodycare on September 7. The brand is promising scent recommendations during the stream plus launch-only offers, which is the standard TikTok Shop playbook now, and for good reason: it works. If Mink prices these the way it prices its body care (most of the lineup sits comfortably in the under-P500 range), expect the perfumes to be positioned squarely against the wave of affordable local fragrances that has been eating into the mall-brand mist market all year.
No prices or bottle sizes until the 7th. Mink's official Shopee store is here if you want to be ready. We'll update once the scents are out.
Blackwater's BW Women I Mist You is summer in three bottles
Blackwater's women's line, BW Women, has followed up its Desire conditioning hair mists with a new trio called I Mist You (pun very much intended), and it's a straightforward pitch: a lightweight conditioning hair mist that adds shine, tames flyaways, and mostly just makes your hair smell like a holiday. It retails at P199. The three scents are Vanilla Whisper (sweet, warm, the gelato-by-the-beach one), Citrus Melody (bright lemon), and Lavender Harmony (soft floral). All three feature an amber, musk, and gourmand base so they don't disappear ten minutes after you spray.
At 100ml a bottle, these are meant to live in your bag. Blackwater has always been good at the under-P200 fragrance-adjacent product (see also their Whimsy deo sprays, which we've reviewed), and this feels like the same idea applied to hair. Available on Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop, and in Watsons and department stores.
Calvin Klein's Smooth Berry mist lands in the Philippines
Calvin Klein's Hair & Body Perfume Mists have been one of the sleeper hits of the past year, largely because they're a nice, unfussy way to smell expensive without committing to a full eau de parfum. The newest addition, Smooth Berry, is now in the Philippines through Luxasia, and it's the most playful of the bunch: a raspberry smoothie accord up top, floral candy in the middle, and warm woods to keep the whole thing from tipping into dessert. The formula is the same lightweight, hydrating base as the rest of the line, so it can go on hair and skin without the crunchy dryness of an alcohol-heavy body spray.
It joins Cotton Musk, Nude Vanilla, Sheer Peach, and Silky Coconut, and the collection is designed to be layered, so Smooth Berry over Nude Vanilla is the obvious combination if you like your berries with a scoop of something. Expect it to retail at P2,598 for 236ml, in line with the rest of the mists at Rustan's The Beauty Source (it's $39 in the US). Available at Rustan's and department stores nationwide.
Dyson made a toothbrush with a camera, and it costs as much as a hair tool
On September 1, James Dyson took the stage in Paris to unveil the Dyson CameraJet, which the company is calling the world's first toothbrush with a built-in camera. And it isn't a gimmick, or at least it isn't only a gimmick. A tiny macro lens is positioned in the brush head and scans your teeth 28 times a second while you brush, and when the AI (trained on 470,000 dental images) spots a gap between two teeth, it fires a small, conical jet of mouthrinse into it within a tenth of a second. The idea is to do the flossing for you, while you brush, without you having to aim anything. The jet runs at a lower pressure than a typical water flosser, so it's meant to be kinder to gums, and the whole thing draws from a 12.5ml tank that refills in three seconds when you set it back on the dock.
The brushing side is serious too: Dyson's variable sonic oscillation moves the bristles nearly a thousand times a second and adjusts on the fly so they don't stall against your teeth, which the company says removes up to 69 percent more plaque in hard-to-reach areas. The dual-bristle head has firmer inner bristles for stains and softer outer ones for the gumline, and each head has an RFID tag so the app knows when it's due for replacement. Speaking of which: the MyDyson app gives you a live view from the camera, coverage maps, and technique feedback. Dyson says nothing is recorded or stored, on the device or in the cloud, which is the sentence everyone will want to hear before they put a camera in their mouth. Over a decade of oral-care research, 661 engineers, 30 dental professionals, and, in a nice local footnote, the jet was optimized with the National University of Singapore's Faculty of Dentistry.
Now, the price. The CameraJet is $499 in the US (roughly P28,000 to P29,000), £369 in the UK, and S$699 in Singapore, where it's already on Dyson's e-store. It comes in Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink with two brush heads, the refill dock, a charging cable, and a travel case. That's roughly $100 more than the top-end Philips and Oral-B brushes, and comfortably Airwrap territory. Dyson Philippines hasn't announced local availability or pricing yet; Malaysia has a register-your-interest page up, so a Southeast Asia rollout looks likely, just not this month. Until then, it's a Singapore trip or a very generous friend.
And that's it for this week's Beauty Roundup!
