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NARS – Sex Machine

02 Sep
NARS - Sex Machine

NARS - Sex Machine

NARS Velvet Matte lip pencil in Sex Machine is a muted mauve-based pink with the absolute tiniest bit of shimmer. Definitely not enough to give you blinged out 80′s-tastic shimmery mauve lips, but enough that there’s the faint illusion of the pencil being slightly satiny and damp.

NARS - Sex Machine

NARS - Sex Machine

I’ve had this pencil for a couple of years and I think I’ve worn it twice, maybe three times at the most. Before I took the picture below and had to give it a quick sharpen so it looked nice and fresh, it still had the original tip shape and bevelled edge on the pencil, just as it was when I first took it out of the box. Nothing about this colour really grabs me, which is a shame. I have other mauve-based pinks like MAC Syrup lipstick and they suit me just fine, but something about Sex Machine on me looks dated, flat and ultra blah. I just can’t make myself rock a lip that makes me look tired and ill, y’know?

NARS - Sex Machine

NARS - Sex Machine

The texture of Sex Machine is a lot nicer than my other Velvet Matte pencil in Dragon Girl. Dragon Girl is hard and chalky and occasionally a little crumbly, whereas Sex Machine is smooth and creamy and very easy to apply. Even applied to bare lips, this goes on lickety-split and there’s no dragging or tiresome little gaps along the lipline to smooth out later.

For pale girls, particularly us of the fair skin/pink undertone variety, I say try it before you buy to make sure it is going to lift your face and not be a vitality black hole like it is for me. Asian and Mediterranean skintones could rock this like mad as a nice alternative to beige-based neutral lips. For gals with darker skin, I say skip it entirely – the mauve tint in the pink base is going to translate into a nasty ashy lip. Gross!

NARS Velvet Matte pencils retail for US$24 from narscosmetics.com, and in Australia they can be found at Mecca Cosmetica for AU$50.

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Mecca Cosmetica – Roman Holiday

01 Sep

This post is so old, it probably has grey whiskers. Roman Holiday nail duo was Mecca Cosmetica’s seasonal nail duo for winter ’10, which means this has been at the bottom of my ‘new make-up: MUST TEST’ bag for, um, six months now. Oops.
For the sake of being a completionist – and also because a lot of the stores still have one or two of these packs on the shelves – here it is anyway.

Mecca Cosmetica - Roman

Mecca Cosmetica - Roman

Roman is a rich red that dries to a slightly darker brickish tone on the nail. This was a one coat wonder – it applied smoothly, with no bubbles or bald spots. The downside is that it isn’t particularly unique or memorable. It’s a perfectly cromulent colour, but it isn’t going to make anyone squeal in delight and demand to know what your nail polish is.

Mecca Cosmetica - Holiday

Mecca Cosmetica - Holiday

Holiday is a delight of a colour, an excellent balance of beige and pink without being too yellow or too rosy. There’s quite a bit of white in the polish so I added a drop or two of polish thinner to get a really good working texture. Without thinning it was just on the ‘slightly annoying’ side of thick, and a little prone to getting blobby.
Thinned or not, this is a (barely) two coater – one gave great coverage, but two coats gave a nicer edge of the polish.

These polishes are now listed as out of stock on the Mecca Cosmetica website, but as of last weekend a few stores in Sydney still had them in stock. They’ve since been replaced with the Spring colour collection, so go take a peek!

This post is so old, it probably has grey whiskers. The Roman Holiday nail duo was Mecca M
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China Glaze – Orange Marmalade

30 Aug

Between Make Up Store Sunrise the other day, MAC Orange and Korres Orange a long time ago and my frequently twittered mentions of yet more orange lipsticks in my collection, I think you’ve all realised I’m a bit of an orange tragic. For years and years I wanted nothing to do with orange, reasoning that it would look terrible on me. Obviously I was completely nuts, ’cause the combination of black hair/blue eyes/ghostly mcghost skin is perfect for orange in all its wonderful forms. Eyes, cheeks, nails, I’m there (but not fake tans. Never a fake tan).

Here’s a totally unsurprising revelation: China Glaze’s Orange Marmalade is my favourite nail polish of all time.

Oh yes, I went there: of. All. Time.

China Glaze - Orange Marmalade

China Glaze - Orange Marmalade

Look at it. Gorgeous golden glass flecked orange perfection. It even looks wonderful on my horrible ham-hands. Swoon!

  • Collection: 2009 - Summer Days
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Good news!

29 Aug

Good news for those of use who are attached to our iPhones and BlackBerries: swatchgirl.com now supports an easy mobile interface!

I’ve tested it out on my iPhone and it seems to be working perfectly, but please let me know what you think!

 
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Make Up Store – Sunrise

28 Aug

If there ever was a brand name dreamed up before the days of websites, easily searched terms and other bits of internet frippery under the banner of SEO, Make Up Store is it. Go on, I dare you to search for ‘make up store swatches’ and see what totally irrelevant results you get. I’ll wait here.

…back? Good. I want to show you a rather nice impulse purchase I made a few weeks back – Make Up Store microshadow in Sunrise.

Make Up Store - Sunrise

Make Up Store - Sunrise

Sunrise is a saucy tropical orange absolutely packed to the gills with gold shimmer. It’s like the fiesty grown-up version of Firespot from MAC, just with the saturation turned up to the max and with enough pigmentation to make a shy girl blush. This is scary pigmented. Stain-your-skin pigmented. Dye-your-white-bristle-brushes pigmented. I think you get where I’m going with this.

Make Up Store - Sunrise

Make Up Store - Sunrise

The magic secret to this shadow seems to be all in the preparation. Prime like you’ve never primed before, because the very soft texture of this eyeshadow makes it a perfect candidate for being applied too thickly and being totally crease-tastic. I normally only use a dab of Too Faced Shadow Insurance on bare skin, but due to the megadose of pigment in this and not wanting to sport attractive orange stains on my peepers, I switched to a very thin layer of MAC Paint Pot in Bare Study on my upper lids to give a nice opaque base.
On my lower lids, given that there’s already a nice base of concealer and foundation powder to provide a barrier, I used a small amount of Shadow Insurance to give extra staying power. I finished the look with a burgundy eyeliner smudged along the upper and lower lashlines and then a liberal application of MAC Blacktrack gel eyeliner on the inner rims to really draw attention into my blue eyes. Lashings of black mascara really brought this whole intense look together and balanced each strong element.

Make Up Store - Sunrise comparisons

Make Up Store - Sunrise comparisons

Comparison time! All of these are applied in one stroke to bare skin. From top to bottom:

  • MAC Coppering
  • MAC Expensive Pink
  • MAC Firespot
  • Make Up Store Sunrise
  • MAC Mythology
  • MAC Goldmine

As an aside, Make Up Store aren’t exactly clear as to what the differences between ‘microshadows’ and ‘cybershadows’ are beyond some vague mentions that one is creamier and the other has more dimension. I’m guessing that cybershadow is their more foolproof day-to-day range and microshadow is the more pigment-dense range with more focus on effects (shimmers, pearls, etc). I’d welcome anyone from Make Up Store to clarify that for me though!

Make Up Store microshadow eyeshadows retail for AU$34 for 3.5g of product. Make Up Store products are available from their retail locations but have no online ordering from the Australian branch of their website. I purchased these from their Chatswood Chase location and cannot recommend the girls there highly enough!

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