I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of Googling makeup swatches and being directed to filtered-to-hell TikTok videos. MAC has reformulated almost all of its lipsticks over the past few years, and it’s next to impossible to find the new ones swatched even on Instagram, let alone on blogs. (Forget about coherent reviews written by real people and not ChatGPT.) So consider this my humble attempt to improve the beauty-shopping experience for us old hags who don’t fuck with TikTok and don’t want to order an expensive lipstick sight unseen.

Consider this, too, part of my modest resistance to the outcome of the recent election (the late capitalism of that statement, I know…). Like millions of other Americans, I’m dismayed and scared. I don’t know what the next few years will bring, and my resources and influence are limited. But here’s what I know I can do: I can make the experience of being alive incrementally better for the people around me in person and online. I can finish my novel. I can return to teaching. And, yes, I can entertain my fellow beauty enthusiasts—and protect them from regrettable purchases—by creating the kind of content I miss seeing on the internet. No filters, no AI pollution,* just the most accurate written and pictorial record of my experience that I can cobble together.

So here we go.

MAC has had a mixed track record with its recent lipstick reformulations. In my opinion, the Lustreglass line, launched in 2021, is a great improvement on the Lustre formula: more evenly pigmented, more moisturizing, better shade range. On the other hand, I loved MAC’s old waxy matte lipsticks and wasn’t thrilled when they were supplanted earlier this year with the same kind of lightweight, silicone-heavy matte formula we’ve seen countless times over the past decade. So when MAC replaced its Satin, Amplified, and Cremesheen formulas with the MACximal Sleek Satin range a couple of months ago, I was, to coin a phrase, nauseously optimistic—except that this time, my optimism was warranted.

While in Center City for my birthday earlier this month, I came across a MAC store and, of course, went inside to swatch as many of the new Satin lipsticks as I could fit on my hand. L-R: Tilted Denim, Popstar Pink, Rebel, Violet Vapor, Guessing Game, Centre of Attention:

Plus the three holiday Frost lipsticks: Regal Red, MACgenta (which looks very much like Starstruck from Holiday 2019), and Brushed in Bronze:

The next weekend, visiting Ulta for some post-election retail therapy, I found testers of almost all the new MAC lipsticks!

I definitely didn’t read this as “Grapefruit Pucker” at first:

And here come the rest of the swatches! All of the shades are MACximal Sleek Satin unless otherwise noted, and most are reformulated classic shades.

L-R: Blankety, Paramount, Film Noir, Modesty:

L-R: Pink Peppermint, Amorous, Del Rio, Lovers Only:

Top: Diva (matte); L-R: Crème in Your Coffee, Dubonnet, Guessing Game, Sin (matte), Avant Garnet (matte):

Top: Guessing Game; L-R: MAC Eugenie (my own), Urban Decay Hex, Urban Decay No Parking (I really like this one!), Urban Decay Bad Blood:

MAC mattes, L-R: No Coral-ation, Keep Dreaming, Ring the Alarm, Avant Garnet:

Having made all these swatches, I think the new Satin formula is overall softer, sheerer, and shinier than the old Satin formula. In fact, it’s like a cross between the three formulas it supplanted: Satin, Amplified, and Cremesheen (not that those three were always distinguishable, anyway).

As you probably gathered from these photos, Guessing Game was the new Satin shade that most appealed to me. When I saw it online, I thought it might be the elusive cool-toned dark red that I’d been searching for. In person, it pulled more purple than I’d expected, like a slightly more violet version of Bésame Noir Red, or a more opaque Glossier Ultralip in Ember. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I tried it on, first at the MAC store and then at Ulta, and found the formula comfortable, the pigmentation surprisingly even, and the color undupeable from my current collection (more on that later). So I bought it (and got $3 off with Ulta points, nice).

The new MAC matte and satin lipsticks are both $25 for 3.5 grams, making them larger than the old MAC lipsticks (3 grams). Given the choice, I’d rather pay a few dollars less for a 3-gram lipstick, but at least these new lipsticks aren’t egregiously shrinkflated.

Here’s Guessing Game next to an old MAC lipstick (left); the black plastic of the tube is now more matte, while the silver plastic is shinier. The brand name is now printed only on the silver band, instead of on the cap and on the upper (silver) part of the tube. Though the new lipsticks are taller, the lids of the old and new lipsticks are the same size, and are in fact interchangeable:

Guessing Game is aptly named, because what color even is this lipstick? MAC describes it as “blackened red.” In the tube, it looks like a deep brownish red with a hint of eggplant:

Swatched on my hand, it turns into a warm purple:

And on my lips, it reddens again, though more so in warm afternoon light (bottom) than in cooler morning light (top; excuse my dry lips):

In terms of seasonal color analysis, I’d characterize Guessing Game as a Dark Winter or even Dark Autumn shade. It leans too purple for many of the warmer seasons, but it’s deeper and more muted than a True Winter plum (e.g. Rebel) would be. The word that comes to my mind is raisin: not a brownish “rum raisin” color à la Revlon Rumberry, but something more closely connected to the vineyard.

I had the hardest time putting together comparison swatches for this post. Some of the lipsticks that I expected to be similar to Guessing Game weren’t all that similar, and some of the lipsticks that did turn out to be similar didn’t make it into my first or second set of photos. (It didn’t help that plum, broadly defined, is my most bloated lipstick category.) Eventually, I made one set of swatches with an array of purple-plum lipsticks, most of which contain very little brown, and another with an array of brown and brown-plum lipsticks. In each pair of photos, the one on top was taken in indirect natural light and the one on the bottom in direct afternoon sunlight.

First, the purple plums, L-R: Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Porto Please, MAC Matte Lipstick in Eugenie, MAC Frost Lipstick in O, Guessing Game, Sephora Collection Sheer Shine Lipstick in Galactic Plum (2 swipes), Revlon Super Lustrous in Va Va Violet, Marc Jacobs Le Marc Lip Crème (RIP) in Vinyl Dream:

Guessing Game contains more brown than any of the other six plums in these photos (except maybe MAC O, which has a gold sheen that isn’t showing up well here). But it looks even more incongruous below, with my true brown and brown-plum lipsticks. L-R: CoverGirl Clean Fresh Tinted Balm in Bliss You Berry (3 swipes), Bobbi Brown Blotted Lip in Blackberry (2 swipes), Guessing Game, NARS 413 BLKR, Maybelline ColorSensational Ultimatte Slim Lipstick in More Cedar, MAC Matte Lipstick in Antique Velvet (old formula):

As it happens, the closest dupe for Guessing Game in my makeup collection is not a lipstick at all, but a blush: Glossier Cloud Paint in Eve (on the right below). Eve might be a tiny bit cooler, but they’re basically identical.

I’ve owned a few lipsticks in MAC’s old Satin formula—Pink Nouveau, Rebel, and Paramount—and they were all stiffer, less glossy, and more opaque than Guessing Game. (Curiously, Pink Nouveau and Paramount both went bad in a few years, which is unusual for MAC in my experience.) Guessing Game is more evenly pigmented than I’d expect for a vampy shade in a relatively shiny formula, but I wish it were less slippery: it struggles to adhere to the inner part of my lower lip, and its longevity is unimpressive. It looks good for a few hours if I don’t eat or drink anything, but here it is after an hour of sipping a latte:

And you might as well remove it completely before eating, because it definitely won’t stand up to a meal; it doesn’t even leave a stain behind. On the plus side for my sensitive lips, the formula feels lightweight and non-drying. I can get a decently sharp line with the bullet itself, and the formula doesn’t feather on me, but I still like to wear a lip liner with a lipstick this dark (I’m wearing NYX Cabaret in all of the photos in this post). Overall, I’m happy with Guessing Game, though I have a feeling that the Sleek Satin formula works better for the lighter, brighter shades.

(Update, 10/11/25: I’ve found that the best way to keep Guessing Game in place for a few hours is to start with a thin layer of a waxy lip liner all over your lips (the NYX Slim Lip Pencil formula is great for this), and then apply the lipstick. You’ll still have to remove it before eating, but it won’t slide off after a sip of water or coffee, which is really all I ask.)

Whenever I buy a new lipstick, I like to situate it within an aesthetic—I mean, God forbid I wear a historically decontextualized lipstick out of the house, can you imagine? Guessing Game is a very ’90s color, but more specifically, it’s the kind of shade that ’90s makeup artists used when they wanted to signal “vintage,” as in Madame Bovary (1991):

The models in John Galliano’s 1920s-inspired spring/summer 1998 show for Dior wore a similar lip color (makeup by Pat McGrath, I believe!):

And then there’s the iconic punkified Clara Bow look of the fashion writer Lynn Yaeger, who draws her exaggerated silent-film lips with MAC Nightmoth lip pencil. Yaeger first created this look decades ago, envisioning “a happy combination of a 1920’s flapper (the bee-stung lips), a flea-market doll (the cheeks) and a prewar Parisian prostitute (the hair in those Brassaï photographs).”

That’s all very well, but how does Guessing Game look on my face? Here I am wearing it with Glossier Lidstar in Bun and Cloud Paint in Eve, in natural indoor morning light:

In artificial light, with ColourPop eyeshadow in Glass Bull (which never shows up in photos, sorry) and Glossier Eve again:

Finally, because how could I not:

*Yes, I’m aware that AI will cannibalize this very post, but I can’t get around that except by putting up a paywall or taking down my blog altogether, neither of which I want to do. Enjoy, robot overlords!