I know what you’ve been thinking. “Carrie,” you’ve been thinking. “All this politics stuff is all very right-on, but where’s the #relateable #content? Why can’t you blog about interesting things, like how to find lipstick that doesn’t make you look like Robert Smith from The Cure’s granny?”

This post’s for you.

One of the things I have to think about now I’m back doing music is whether my lipstick will end up all over my face when I sing in my band. Some singers stand back a bit from the microphone, but I’m not one of those singers – so if I use anything more interesting than a nude colour, I end up looking like a messier version of this:

We did some promo photos recently before rehearsing and I went for a pretty dark colour; after a few hours of singing afterwards I looked like a toddler who’d got into their mum’s makeup bag and also made a lot of really bad life choices.

I’ve been trying to find something a bit less frightening for a while, and thanks to a recommendation on Twitter by National columnist, genuinely nice person and rocker of superb lipsticks Kirsty Strickland, I tried this stuff:

It’s called Superstay 24 Matte Ink, it’s by Maybelline, it’s currently 3 for 2 in Boots and it’s brilliant. I can get through three hours of mauling the mic without moving a single molecule of it, and it’s so tough that it might be the only thing left after a nuclear war: we might end up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but at least we’d look pretty fierce.

It’s not perfect. It feels tacky on your lips – you know how gloss paint feels when you touch it and it’s almost but not quite dry, and you leave a fingerprint? That – and the darker colours are a nightmare to get off when you’re tired and just want to go to bed. It’s also a menace to fix if you get your line wrong.

But if like me you’re all over the mic when you perform and you’d rather not end up looking like a bad hallowe’en costume, or if you’d just like to go for a night out without having to reapply every half hour, it’s worth the downsides. This lipstick stays stuck.