Xmas came early for me this year after a kindly reader, Carole in Canada, sent me an incredibly generous bounty of Nars and Bite Beauty goodies, purely out of the goodness of her heart.  That shit doesn't happen every day, let me tell you, so I'm going to review my favourite of the bunch, Nars Audacious Marlene.  Thanks, Carole!

You may have noted that I am a bit of a fucking Nars superfan but this enthusiasm is based strictly on an overwhelmingly positive experience of the brand.  In particular, I don't think I've ever met a Nars Audacious shade I didn't like, and Marlene is no exception to that unblemished record.  

Marlene is a warm, bricky red, the colour of a really good tomato soup or a pile of cayenne pepper, rich and dense with a strong orange undertone.  Once again, Nars pulls off the impossible by creating a hot red that doesn't look like something stuck to Imelda Marcos' or Pennywise's teeth in 1978. You have got to respect that. 

It is loud, but in a RuPaul sort of way; there is great art and finesse in its brilliant volume.  Furthermore, there is a strongly organic quality to Marlene's bigness, which is probably why it's so successful aesthetically.  It is the queen of all the ocherous reds I've tried thus far, pulling in the best elements of capsicum, brick dust, vermillion lacquer, blood orange, volcanic mud and hot sauce.

Despite all those descriptors I wouldn't really call this shade dirty, for the same reason it's not really retro or vintage looking either; that deep twist to its incredible saturation keeps it strangely contemporary.

The Audacious range features a number of different finishes, with this shade representing its most creamy and opaque manifestation.  Marlene applies like warm butter, spreading easily right from that nice fat bullet without feeling greasy or slippery, pretty much cancelling out the influence of your native lip colour, which is always a blessing.

​It doesn't thin out, even with vigorous redistribution, nor does it really dry down, retaining its supremely comfortable satiny finish that is tenacious enough to live through hot drinks and a light meal without wandering into any old bag wrinkles or doing that greasy breakdown thing.  It's lasting and reliable.

You might be able to perceive the overwhelming nature of this shade's pigmentation and opacity in the palm swatches below.  Sheer it is not.

We can't afford to smash a bottle of champagne against the prow of our new porch to declare it officially open, so just imagine video hos twerking in a semicircle to celebrate the occasion.

Unlike those other bloggy people who pretend they love working together as part of their particular romantic coupley brand, R and I usually end up at each others' throats in the course of practical projects, due to our shall we say conflicting modi.  I am proud to report that nobody died during this one, but I feel it was more of a fluke than personal progress.  I'm sure plenty of people still got to hear me losing my shit at crucial moments as they walked their dogs past the site.

This structure was necessary due to a month of downpours and high winds robbing us of our treasured purple bird plum, which provided shelter to this spot before keeling over toward the house one morning during a gale, almost taking the aviary with it.  It was gut-wrenching to have to cut it down and we will miss the yearly blossom spectacle horribly.  

The incredibly luscious, neon-emerald velveteen of Tibouchina 'Moonstruck's foliage.  I planted the darker purple variety out last year but it shit itself over winter, so I'll keep this guy potted.  Tibouchinas are super-draggy in flower but I don't accept that there's such a thing as bad-taste plants.

Below: the lovely silver and indigo stylings of Salvia discolor.  It's a brittle, slightly awkward plant but the near-perpetual flowering and scent of blackcurrant cordial pleases me greatly.

With the newish potted garden out the front of the house, I've been getting into Salvia in a big fucking way.  These are a selection of the earliest flowering wee jamensis  and microphylla hybrids; there are red and yellow varieties just coming on.  I have other larger species, including the obscenely green involcruta below left, but they're generally more of a midsummer-autumn thing. 

Ambridge Rose: one of the pretty bloody wimpy DA roses I've rescued from very moderate competition in the general garden.  Its revival from a single cane is more tribute to the quality of the graft than the plant itself.  I persist with this variety because the colour is lovely and the scent is a truely delicious hardcore myrrh.  Wish I knew how to quit you.

The very gratifying Urospermum dalechampii, the Golden Fleece Daisy.  The foliage is dandylionsque and the leaves you see at right belong to an unrelated nearby sage.  It's supposedly a pest in some places but guess how many shits I give.

Below: much excite-, the slow unfurling of Arisaema speciosa, the Beautiful Arisaema.  After getting a bit too fucking optimistic and planting out the Aroids I had amassed, then losing the poor little buggers to our wet winters, I decided to try again and stick to pot culture.  This guy is the first one up.  I will post more pics when the other species do something interesting.