| I do love a punk lip and it's been that way forever. I'm old enough to remember when we had to mix up these sorts of colours with nasty eyeliner chock-full of do-not-ingest shiz, stage blush, piss-weak Revlon not-reds and half-arsed plums. Needless to say, I don't sigh for those days. They were crap.  I did think twice about ordering from the Punk Couture Collection though, having been stung by too much patchy and/or gimmicky lately. |  L2R MAC Instigator, Studded Kiss |
Buuut who am I kidding with that shit? Asceticism? Denying oneself a pleasure? Lol; nope. I caved hard, and I'm glad I did because Studded Kiss and Instigator are some of the nicest things I've seen from MAC in the last couple of years. I kept the swatches on the 'cool' side to give you a decent idea of what they really look like, since the interweb is full of phonecam misrepresentations and I hate that myself. Both red and purples tend to look stupidly warm unless you process them out of the camera, even with something like my Nikon D300 which has a fabulous sensor. I know I say that all the time but it's important to remember. I worked on these shots to keep them real; looking at them on my iMac and then at the swatches on my hand, I'd say they're 95% accurate.
 L2R: MAC Instigator, Studded Kiss. Indoor natural daylight unflashed. |  |
Studded Kiss is a really nice, deep, complex, muddy ruby, hovering somewhere between Russian Red and Viva Glam I with a bit of raspberry thrown in. It's perhaps a little darker on the lip than it appears here. The finish is just off-matte and will move on the lip, so not crazy-stiff. It shares a slightly muted, almost sepia quality with the recent Retro Matte Fixed on Drama, without its formulation issues; not as look at meeee as some pics might suggest. It's what I wanted Fixed on Drama to be, really. Two thumbs up- I'm very happy I splashed out on it.
| Instigator is that most difficult of beasts; blue-toned purple. It's not that I'm scared of looking whack or even dead (I've looked one/the other my entire adult life)- it's just that I don't want to look tragically, unintentionally stupid. Instigator flirts with the latter effect unless you build the rest of your look around it. It's not a casual, slap-on thing. The colour is certainly beautiful; if you're familiar with MAC Smoked Purple, you're close, but this guy is less black, less patchy, warmer, slightly more magenta-y and a much better formula, god. Smoked Purple is fucking horrible and this is dreamy in comparison. Smooth, slightly creamy, off-matte, in fact probably as good as intense purple gets. Just don't buy Instigator hoping it's less blue or somehow kinder than it looks, because it's not. It'll wear you like a hat if you're not careful. Or brave. Or both. |  L2R: MAC Rebel, Instigator, Studded Kiss, Russian Red. Outdoor filtered daylight, unflashed. |
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