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RubyHue Lipstick Review: Pat McGrath Unnatural Natural

27/1/2021

 
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The Gen X bellwether influences in Pat McGrath’s aesthetic will always be an intrinsic pillar of her appeal to we peeps of a certain vintage.  That darksided moosh of dirt and luxe, sinister historical x futuristic bling, the visual angst and effusion.  She came up with freaky units like Philips and Garland, McQueen, Galliano and Mugler et al., at a time when everything was on the slab and subject to the art school scalpel.  McGrath's shit is instantly recognisable and largely worthy of the reverence it receives.  So refreshing in these tawdry times!
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I’ve always admired two things about the Pat McGrath range from a distance; voluptuous packaging and the rigorous specificity of her individual shades.  Each one is a look per se, existing for a particular reason instead of just occupying some pointless rung on a chromatic ladder (see: latter-day MAC).  It's a bit weird then that Unnatural Natural (Luxetrance) is the first McG lipstick I’ve owned.   That would be because the retail price tag is beyond insane; pushing $80 here in the southern hemisphere with postage and that’s a fuck outta here situation, vanity be damned.  If you’re going to snatch an entire hundy, you better knock me on my arse with unconditional pornographic awesomeness.  So I dodged that trauma and picked it up second hand.  

​Unnatural Natural is, I think, discont’ now but there’s plenty still knocking around online; I salute my budget-conscious hos with this belated review.
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On a light face (my personal experience), UN is a lot; dark, strident, graphic and not something the casual lipstick person will probably enjoy.  For one, it comes out swinging from the tube with 100% intensity.  You can’t really cut it back for a daytime look.

The shade itself is a deep, highbrow, violet milk-chocolate brown.  The former keeps the latter decidedly neutral, even somewhat cool, so don’t pick this up thinking you’re getting a cosy ochre that will fuck well with your spray tan; Unnatural Natural will possibly hiss at your bronzer and any yellow tones you might have knocking around.

The violet element was apparent in the stain left by the palm-swatch, so please note its low-key pervasive influence on this shade if that's a tone you struggle with.  UN plays down the green in my eyes and emphasises the darker greyish murk, but makes my neutral to pinkish skin look great.  
While it's a beautiful and far more neutral option for deeper complexions with cooler elements, you might want to be dark/light enough to provide adequate contrast to avoid a lost-lip outcome.

UN in this Luxetrance formula is quite... 
heavily present on the lip, reminding me of another slightly annoying formulation, maybe some of MAC’s gluggier mattes, without the overt chalkiness?  It’s not so much uncomfortable as distracting and I do find it a wee bit drying on wipe-off.  There is a thick, waxy satin finish that persists, but the overall, socially-distanced impression is of a dense off-matte rather than any obvious lustre. 
Most disappointingly, it thins out on the centre of my lower lip after a few minutes under no particular duress, which fucks with the shade’s uniformity.  That is not something I’m inclined to forgive in a product at this price point.
​​
Unnatural Natural is a nice product, overall. That I wouldn’t put it in my top five is a bit of a surprise to me, given the hype.  The colour is sophisticated but the formula has some tactile drawbacks and the price makes me abandon cart every fucking time.  Oh well. ​
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L2R, MAC unless stated:
Russian Red, Sin, PMcG Unnatural Natural, Jasper, Paramount,
​Nars Golshan, Nars Lonely Heart, Marrakesh, Spice It Up
Paramount looks dupe-esque on the hand and you probably don't need both products, but its dissimilar formula makes it more of a trad brown once applied.  I thought Jasper (LE) would be a lot closer: nope- it's more of a Sin-type blackened, boiled wine.  Spice It Up may be difficult to get straight with the camera on a sunny day but it has quite a bit in common with UN, hue-wise, if you're looking for a lighter, shinier version.
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RubyHue Lipstick Review: You maybe masked and locked down but you can still be Glamour


The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Dakhma 17

25/1/2021

 
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Shaw's mirror showed him the remaining conscript emerging from his suicidal transport.  Scrabbling to his feet, the man stared up at the over-looming parapet as though waiting for it to pronounce a deferred doom.  The wind flapped his clothes against his body and snow blurred him momentarily; when nothing more occurred, he murmured and began to brush himself off with mindless hands that fell once more to slack disuse while Susan searched the empty castellations on her own account, closing her eyes and dropping back onto her knees.

​Still in a crouch of his own, Shaw began to struggle out of the ephemera that was strapped to him.  Josephine snatched up the tracking device he had cut loose and threw it back at him, striking his shoulder.

"You won't get clear... " she promised, watching him upend his pack and gather what he needed.  "She'll spill everything when they get her in the chair..."  
"This place is fucking empty, she doesn't know shit and you..."  Breaking off, he lunged forward after Susan's hands, too late to stop their lashing strike.  She punched the split length of silvered pine butted in her fists into Josephine's thigh, committing her entire weight to the assault; driven deeply, the dry wood pierced her skin, skidding then stubbed blunt between the knot of bones and sheaths inside her knee.  The woman retched out a rasping cry, clutching the leg as the shard shifted in the flesh contracting round it and Susan launched herself at her, clubbing furiously at her face with both bound hands.  They slid together down the wet slope; Shaw shouted after them, but as he struggled to his feet it was the sucking crack of a bullet loosed from the ruin that stilled the women struggling below.

His head snapped forward on his neck and opened, expelling wet red and thick sodden pink through the outward dissolution of his features.  The hot matter struck the side of Susan's face; his body listed, dropping to and falling forward from its knees.  On the ledge the remaining conscript caught a second round and toppled before the sound of the first had died away.  Susan kicked back from the woman underneath her, fingers sliding on a small stretch of half-buried black, a pistol jogged from its holster and stamped into the thin snow.  Snatching it up, she planted her boots against the woman's hip and aimed the weapon at her face.

Her shot threw the pistol backward in her hands.  A knocking report swept down the hillside as a booming seashore echo, leaving a dark puncture in the snow by Josephine's left ear, but before she could amend her aim, a grasp closed on her jersey and hauled her sideways; keeping his hold on her, Sachiin swung his rifle from his shoulder and struck the stranger senseless with its stock.  

The soft sound of his voice puzzled Susan, seeming new to her while behind them his brother cast fresh snow over the ledge in dropping from it, holding his rifle clear.  The chain still bound her to the nameless woman and she exclaimed in sudden and visceral repugnance, casting up screeds of dirty snow as she pounded her boot against the latters' arm and ribcage until Sachiin cut the black cuffs from her wrists.  With her freed, he sat down on the slope as though his legs had failed him, finding the hand that hung by her side with his own and breathing a prayer of thanks, his eyes still wide and holding a ghost of their commonplace shade.  Shaw's stricken body shifted weakly in a slow, petering contraction, closing on itself with a series of little shudders, like a child wracked by the distant passage of a dream.

Susan cleared her throat and slid her hand from his to push back her loosened braids.  The snow wandered against her face as she drew her sleeve down over her wrist and used it to wipe the thick pink spatter from her mouth.



Blushing pulses of pain roused Josephine to the sight of dark eyes in a pale scowl blurred down to lithic tones and shifting, misted shapes.  The girl wrestled her black boot from her left foot, wrenching the leg that had swollen around the shaft of wood still buried in its knee.  With her head to the foot of the ruin, Josephine saw the curving wall loom in a dreadful grey parabola, black cuffs securing her hands at the small of her back, though she could no longer feel them.  Her former captive shuffled her feet into the warmth of the stolen boots, walking a short distance and stopping to rock back and forth, then stooping to lace them with her best hand.  Josephine's rifle slid forward against the back of her head from where it hung across her shoulders.

The small party had chosen sparingly from the vanquished corps' equipment, satisfying necessity more than preference, Susan taking obsessive care to locate those samples wrested from her person.  Having segregated them in the midst of the clearing, she looked again toward the survivor and stamped her new boots over the fragile receptacles, splintering and kicking them into oblivion.  Behind her, Sachiin lifted her pack to test the balance of the load, cheating Fyodor's questing snout of the rations stowed in its compartments.  Shaw's body lay like refuse, limbs left skewed by their passage over the stony ground; a florid drag had trailed the remaining portions of his head like effluent bleeding from a rusting pipe.  

Josephine did not know that her weatherproof garments had been awarded to Susan, feeling only random and dissonant elements of her own exposure, pinching pain and blue-hued absences.  The fraternal creatures standing before her claimed the whole of her faltering attentions, the fauna of a lost continent that drifted away slowly while they walked its distant shore, a paradox that crowded all else backward.  Snow embraced them as surely as it reviled her, closing like the jungle around the oscillated feline and leaving nothing to explain.  She ate what she could get of them until the memory began to seize and fracture, choked with their detail, closing her eyes only when the frowning girl complained to a companion of her stare.

The shadow had been scoured from the wall beneath the steps since Petrouchka's demise.  Sachiin followed its curve to her remains, where his hands moved in a simple observance, articulating sorrow and gratitude.  That which had been spared by her immolation was already half-interred by snow, its sated darkness consumed in turn.  

"I don't think she did it for us." Susan ventured, standing at his side.  He half-turned to pick her up and held her dumbly.  "Breathe." she urged into his ear, appraised of the suspension he still suffered despite her warmth and sentience.  His brother brought tape from Josephine's kit and Sachiin set her down to wrap her injured fingers; she watched their crushed colours disappear, letting him go to make a final sweep of their surrounds.

"They could have had us all by now.  You should have gone." she told Kala'amātya.  He did not reply.  

"I put my foot down." Sachiin admitted. 

​"Again?"  Susan's face slackened into a half-formed smile, but it was dismissed by the purpose that turned her back toward Kala'amātya and prompted her to trail him as he performed his own final survey of the debris broadcast around them.  "Petrouchka was lying..." she whispered, wiping stiffened hair from her cheek and awaiting some sign that he was attending to her communique,  "She told me Helaine was happy, and then sad... not the other way around."  His acknowledgement was wordless and delayed, evinced as an expression he turned away from her, but she was gratified, and stood to work a glove over her injured hand.  He emptied the rifle he had used to kill Shaw and the conscript, laying it out beside Josephine in an act that Susan came slowly to appreciate.  "That cow was the one who did this to my fucking hands."  She leaned once more over the woman's leg, examining the wound she had inflicted with a satisfaction as plain as carbon daubed across her face.  "It looks bad..."   

Josephine's gaze continued to mine the precious values of Kala'amātya's surface.  He returned her stare with something forged beyond the windblown, fox-grey span of prosaic indifference.

"Will she walk, if she makes it out of here?"

"Eventually." he conceded.   Susan squinted at her own irresolution when his silence became expectant.  

"So it's up to me..."
​
"She's your mark.  You get the horns."
​
​"I think I'll leave it.  It sort of feels like throwing back a live grenade." she declared, taking out the pistol and directing it at Josephine in passing.  "It won't be your fucking knee next time." she promised her, joining Sachiin as he moved out, the piglet trailing him closely.

They skirted the stiffening remains of the corps; Susan held her companion's hand in negotiating the drop onto the snow-blurred trail, blowing the flakes from her fringe and urging him onward.  The narrow way curved to the east with the hollow leading from the weathered spur, the clouds lowering to graze the apex of the tallest pines.  Where the steps diverged they halted, the brothers murmuring to one another, Kala'amātya offering a handgun and a fold of bills to Sachiin and accepting a camouflaged bag in the exchange.  The latter lifted Fyodor from the snow and over his shoulder, stuffing the small animal under the cowl of his pack.

"Sis'thle bai'in." he said softly, addressing the brief courtesy to his brother.
"What's this?  Where are you going?" Susan demanded.
"West." replied Kala'amātya.
"East." Sachiin confirmed when she looked back to him. 

"But... when will..."  The question's plaintive irresolution and the expression that accompanied it took them both by surprise, Kala'amātya shifting the rifle to his left shoulder.  He waited momentarily, then lifted the hood of his sweatshirt, stepping up onto the westward flight.  She caught his arm and turned him back toward her.  "Wear you teeth, and don't be such a bastard." she whispered, wresting something small from the pocket of her jeans and pushing it into his grasp.  "It's got a filling, but don't throw it away... it's definitely lucky."

He looked down at the tooth in the palm of his hand, then turned again and began the long climb toward the wooded ridge, his footprints first softened, then obliterated by snow.  Blowing on her hands, she watched her breath curl in plumes as he was lost to them, still frowning to herself.

"Do you know where he's going?" she asked her remaining companion.
"Yeah..." Sachiin admitted through a seasoned scowl.  "I'm pretty sure I do."

He held out his hand and she stepped down with him in the opposite direction, beside the course of an infant spring, its silvered flux slicing through the snow in its desire for the darkness of the gorge.




f i n i s

*

Read the Book onsite


Re: Insurrection Fail

9/1/2021

 
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😂😂😂😂😂😂
​To anyone genuinely wondering, no, this was not an Antifa gig.  Leftists and social justice people don't need euphemisms or false flag bullshit.  We say it all out loud and don't need to hide behind any weak-arse fuckery because our principles are clear and meaningful.

I did mention this before.  But it bears repeating.  
Stay safe!
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