RubyHue Lipstick Review: Urban Decay Super-Saturated High Gloss Lip Color Pencils in F-Bomb & Punch Drunk

Urban Decay Super-Saturated High Gloss Lip Color Pencils is a fuck tonne of words in regard to anything, let alone something chucked on one's mouth for no compelling reason.  And you certainly know when you have chucked these on.  As soon as I applied these pencils I recognised that stubborn, peculiar texture common to so many recent UD lip products; I swear I can tell this brand from a dozen others blindfolded.

Presumably they are meant to deliver a lip gloss/casual look along with the superior performance of a lipstick proper.  I detest most lip glosses because they tend to be shitty, streaky, overpriced messes possessing all the visual charm of ejaculate without the attendant pleasure of conjugation and what is the point of that, you might well ask.

So I wasn't aware that I was in the market for these pencils until buying them on a blind whim and thereby discovering that Urban Decay might just have cracked the elusive glossy+staying power oxymoron.  

​It's just that you might not like how they do it.

How do they get that shit done?  With the magic of sticky thickness.  This Super Saturated stuff is thick.  And stickier than a swamp-beast's taint, jesus holy mary.  Sticky enough to slow down your hand during application and almost paste your lips to one another after they've been pressed together.

​The mouth feel is somewhat like a half-dried little kid's glue- you know- the kind that never really works but is at least nontoxic.  These pencils are the thickest, stickiest products I've ever used and I imagine plenty of punters will passionately hate them for this extreme textural quality.

I don't, personally.  While there's not much to enjoy about the stubbornly persistent tackiness, they do serve up exceptionally good non-streaky, non-straying colour in the kind of glowing, summer-bright, stained glass way that only precisely this kind of superthick translucency can deliver.  They are far less texturally attractive than either the Nars Satin or the Bite High Pigment pencils, which I consider gold standards, but they outlast both through food, hot weather and outdoor exertion.  That's your return on all that gloopy annoyance; staying power and stability.

​I bust my arse every day on our adjacent hills and after an hour of sweaty temp spikes, slack-jawed panting, hair/wind interaction and nonstop profanity, this formula is virtually pristine.  Nothing else with a sheen has ever touched that performance, pour moi.

You can wear them as thinly and artfully as you please but you'll need a brush or an expert finger for anything more than a basic application.  Layered up, they'll last most of the day and I don't get any bleeding, just a light fade and a little migration after hot drinks.  There's no meaningful scent or irritation and only minor staining.

This sort of gloss level can be unflattering, especially on thinner lips or as we get older and these are probably aimed at a sub-30 market.  But I'm early-forties with fairly full lips and feel that I can wear this product without causing people to scream and reach for their amulets.  Probably because it's a voluptuous, cushiony sort of gloss instead of an oily-type shine, plumping without making you look as though you've been licking grease traps. I love the Revolution lipsticks and almost all the UD products I have recently tried for this reason- I think they drop serious R&D money, really nailing the technical aspect to deliver superior aesthetics.  Credit where it's due.

You will need to sharpen these pencils and while that is annoying, they just wouldn't survive a wind-up format; my Nars twin-hole sharpener works fine.

F-Bomb is a shade culled from the Revolution line and this High Gloss version is exactly the same pin-up cadillac red, rendered around 15% more translucent by this formula.  The tube version is perhaps richer, but you really do not need both.  This is not a quiet red so consider yourself warned.

Quiet isn't a word I'd use to describe Punch Drunk either, a shade I think is exclusive to this formula.  It's a bright, clean yellow-leaning orange with a dash of golden/apricot microglitter... yeah, I know.  I'm not keen on that disco shit either, but it's fairly low-key on the lip, putting in its most meaningful appearance when you're wiping off, which can be a cool effect on its own, incidentally.  It is almost neon-bright, glassy-glossy, slightly easier to apply than F-Bomb, adheres well to the middle of the lip and is really fucking loud.  There's a sort of stupid tangelo violence to Punch Drunk and I for one enjoy this affront to good taste.  Its wrongness can be righted by an otherwise bare face; I have pink-toned skin and have to go hard with this shade to make the connection with the yellow in my eyes and freckles, which creates a left-field harmonic.  Punch Drunk's clarity means it doesn't really yellow-up your teeth too badly either, so be brave and really slap it on; you'll look like you've copped a dose of restalyne if nothing else.  The more I ponder it, the more I'm compelled to admit that I really enjoy this fucked up shade at 100% volume.

So in summary- these UD Super Saturated Gloss pencils are horrendously sticky, pretty glossy, slightly difficult, well-pigmented and very lasting.  Would I buy them again?  Nah, probably not.  Will I wear these?  There's definitely a daytime/workout place in my heart for them.  Quick trick: if like me you're starting to get a few lines around the edge of your lips, try slightly smudging out the margins of these glossier products with a cotton bud/Qtip- works a treat.

L2R: (All comparisons MAC)  Russian Red, F-Bomb pencil, F-Bomb lipstick, MAC Red, Chili, Punch Drunk, So Chaud, Strange Journey (LE)
​in a range of natural indoor and outdoor light.  The non-greasy gloss is difficult to capture in flat light.

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