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Kate Middleton & Meghan Markle’s Awkward Exchange Over Lip Gloss—And This Is the $28 Product In Between It All

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Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle at Wimbledon 2018.
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Royally-obsessed fans: If you haven’t already read Prince Harry’s tell-all memoir, Spare, from cover-to-cover, then you probably don’t know about the very (and we mean very) awkward encounter Meghan Markle (41) and her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton (41) had back in the day over a tube of—get this—lip gloss. The Duke of Sussex details the entire incident in his novel, and if you are just dying to know the brand of the lip gloss, then you’ve come to the right place.

It all started before the couples made their highly anticipated appearance at the Royal Foundation Forum in 2018. Per an excerpt from his memoir (according to Page Six), Markle asked the Princess of Wales (formerly known as the Duchess of Cambridge) to use her lip gloss. Prince Harry referred to the gesture as an “American thing.”

He continued, “Kate, taken aback, went into her handbag and reluctantly pulled out a small tube. Meg squeezed some onto her finger and applied it to her lips. Kate grimaced.”

The Sussexes’s and the Waleses’s at the Royal Foundation Forum in 2018.
Chris Jackson - WPA Pool/Getty Images

The lip gloss in question? Princess Catherine handed the duchess her trustworthy tube of  Clarins Natural Lip Perfector ($28), a product that has been a staple in the royal’s purse for quite some time. Page Six also pointed out that the princess loves the product so much that she used the same tube of lipstick while attending Wimbledon in 2019.

Kate Middleton Meghan Markle Wimbledon in 2019 CAT
Karwai Tang/Getty Images

Shortly after the incident, Harry hoped that the four of them “should’ve been able to laugh about” the situation and move on. However, that simply wasn’t the case because the duke felt that the media believed there was “something bigger” underneath the surface.

Who knew lip gloss could cause such a sticky situation?

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Assistant Editor, News And Entertainment

Karelle McKay is the Assistant Editor of News and Entertainment at PureWow. Before she started writing about all things pop culture, she was a literal couch potato who loved...