Hello there! Does anyone have any idea of what the best way of modelling this smear of a lipstick?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.
Perhaps the best approach would be to sculpt it. Maybe a plane with dynamic topology enabled, if you really want all that detail to be actual geometry (not bump maps/displacement).
Or a simple low poly base mesh, (same plane) then add displacement textures and normal maps to get the bulges and details.
HI tatertoss
Your best option would be to convert the image into a normal or displacement texture, you can do it in Photoshop or Gimp or using Crazy bump. But if you want to, you can sculpt it using dynamic topology too.
Hope this helps
Thank you very much for the response, noted on that. I will try that approach. 
Hello shashu!
Thank you very much, I will search how to convert this image into a normal or displacement texture to get the details done. I will do sculpting too with dyntopo enabled, thank you. 
depends also how realist you want it !
here is quick UV map without Gray map and with greymap / normal
happy cl
I just use an external soft to do a grey map
and use it for the normal map which is not the best way
might work better with a bump map
all images are very low res
hope you got better high res pics for this model
I remove the HDRI map on world
so try to find one or it will show pink color !
lipstick-1.blend (131.0 KB)
happy cl
Noted on that. Thank you very much for this. I will open the blend file.
I replace the normal map node with bump map and looks ok I guess
play with strength to adjust bumps on render
also change sun light set up
or use some spot light for better shadows in render !
correct some of the face’s normal on bottom left
and adjust may be the UV map or add some verts to better define rounded parts
and redo the unwrap project then re adjust the scale to fit the mesh!
happy cl
Sweeeet. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.