Monday Makeup Madness: On Color and Lip Tars

Those who know me wouldn't necessarily know that I love playing with color. Sure, I wear all sorts of colors on my nails, but as far as the face goes, it ranges anywhere from just sunscreen to a sunscreen + tinted moisturizer + a lip product w/ SPF + full eye makeup depending on when I manage to get myself up. (I'm not a morning person and I usually rush to get ready for work.) The eyeshadow is almost always in the neutral family. Anyway, color. Love it. I just don't get much of a chance to use much of it, which is a shame. Over the weekend, I got around to something I'd been meaning to do for a while: blending OCC Lip Tars to create a custom color. I was excited and a little scared even though it's really just like mixing paint, which I've done many times. My first attempt was inspired by the San Jose Sharks' main color:



This is Rx mixed with Botanical...I'd say the mix is about 70/30. Please excuse the redness of my face. :P This was taken indoors with natural light, so the actual color's a little brighter than it is in the photo. If I'm ever brave enough to wear this to a Sharks game, I might add just a touch of Tarred to the mix so that it's not quite as bright and therefore more wearable...um...if one could make teal more wearable on the lips, that is.

Monday Makeup Madness: Inky

Behold: OCC Inky. (Click on the image for a larger version.)



Two coats, no application issues. It's an extremely dark blue, almost black. It probably looks like it IS black in some lights. I see it as blue, but that might be because I put it on and know what color it is? The sun was barely out today, so that was the best I was able to do for an outdoor pic. I took another one indoors because it's about the same color as my coffee mug at work:



There you have it! Next week I'll either compare and contrast pink champagne eyeshadow shades or write about the Stars Makeup Haven palette I got a while ago.

Monday Makeup Madness: Linkroll

Feeling lazy tonight. I went to the Giants game earlier today, and now I'm just relaxing on the couch watching tennis. I attempted to swatch eyeshadow earlier the week, but I still have to work on the pictures. Perhaps next week. In the meantime, I present to you some links of interest:

All About the Parabens (The Next Best Thing to Going Shopping Yourself)
I enjoyed reading this. I'd been hearing "paraben-free" a lot but didn't really know what the deal was.

Anime and Company (The Girly Show)
OCC Lip Tar mixes featuring the color Anime. This one's over a month old, but it's still interesting.

Urban Decay Nail Polish!! New Apocalyptic Nail Kit for Holiday 2009! (Scrangie)
When I first saw these I was highly intrigued. However, the more I thought about it, the more clear it was that I didn't NEED it. I have way too much nail polish as it is, plus it's a set, and I could only see myself using half of them on a regular basis. I've seen some complaints that these colors aren't "unique like UD's old nail polish colors". I don't know...it seems like it was easier to make a unique color then than it is now. I mean, these days it's pretty easy to find nail polish in every color of the rainbow if you so desire. Anyway, for this set, the most interesting shade to me is White Widow, and the one I'd be most likely to wear is Gunmetal.

Another thing that was funny--and maybe some of you noticed this--is that the price was $25 but changed to $26 a couple of days later. I also noticed a similar change for their 24/7 sets--the Hi-Fi & Stereophonic sets were $30, then they were $29, while the Super Stash dropped from $39 to $36. I noticed the changes on urbandecay.com a day or two after I saw all of these products listed over on ulta.com with the second set of prices. (I'm going to guess the Super Stash and the nail set sold out over at Ulta since I no longer see them on the site.)

Monday Makeup Madness: Three Obsessive Compulsive Nail Polish Shades

I'd only heard of Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics recently, when I saw a review for their Lip Tars over on Makeup Geek. A few weeks ago they had a gift with purchase special going on, and the gift was a full-sized loose colour concentrate in Clover and a mini nail lacquer in Pageant. Apparently Pageant used to be called Anime, which had me confused because they had recently added a new color to their lip and nail lineups called Anime. How different is the new Anime from the old Anime? Well, I bought the Anime nail lacquer and, with my Pageant mini, I was able to do a comparison. Click the image for a larger version:



Pageant is on the pinky/middle fingers, Anime is on the ring/index fingers and in the bottle. I did two coats of each one, partly so you could see the difference in opacity as well as color, and partly because the second coat of Anime was a bit too thick, so I was afraid of messing it up if I did anything more to it. As you can see, Anime is much sheerer and more of a neon color (this is more apparent in the bottle than on my nails...the OCC site accurately described this color as "sheer, glossy day glo pink"). I'm not sure how many coats it would have taken to get it close to the opacity Pageant gave me.

Adding to the confusion is an OCC post on Scrangie that I saw before I did this experiment. The first color shown in that post is Pageant fka Anime (this was before the new Anime came out). Based on her swatch and description of the color, I'm now wondering if the original Anime, renamed Pageant, was named Anime once more and that the color of Pageant changed. o_O ...So confused. But they're both pretty. I really like Pageant and I'm wondering what Anime would look like over a white base.




I ended up wearing another OCC color, Rhythm Box, over the weekend. Do not be fooled by the dot on their website! They describe this color as "pale bright violet"--the first thing I thought of when I saw the bottle was of red-violet Crayola crayons. A raspberry-ish color, if you will. The polish looks just a bit warmer in the large picture than it does in real life, though (and in the smaller picture here, it looks just about right--the heck?).

I didn't necessarily plan to do a bunch of pictures like this, but who knows? If it becomes a regular thing, I'll probably have to start watermarking since that's what everyone else seems to be doing. Not that I think my pictures are all that good, haha. I also took some pictures of random eyeshadow swatches over the weekend that I wanted to throw into this post, but I didn't get around to cropping them, so they'll have to wait.