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RubyHue Lipstick Review: MAC Studded Kiss & Instigator (LE)

22/1/2014

 
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.
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I did think twice about ordering from the Punk Couture Collection though, having been stung by too much patchy and/or gimmicky lately.
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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.
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L2R: MAC Instigator, Studded Kiss. Indoor natural daylight unflashed.
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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.
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L2R: MAC Rebel, Instigator, Studded Kiss, Russian Red. Outdoor filtered daylight, unflashed.

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