Beautifully Disney Lipgloss Swatches (Maleficent, Merida, Ariel, Belle, Snow White and The Wicked Queen)

This week I came back from my wedding/honeymoon in Florida, which naturally for me was largely Disney-based! I’ve always been a huge, huge Disney fan and it was a wonderful trip in every way. I’ll be sharing my wedding makeup soon.

Disney have their own range of makeup available in the parks called 'Beautifully Disney,' and naturally I was all over it! It's available at several locations in Walt Disney World, with the largest range available in the Co-Op Market in Downtown Disney, where the products are (loosely) themed into collections - there was a Villains collection, an Alice collection, and two displays of princesses and Disney heroines - and the range includes blushes, eyeshadow palettes, lipglosses, mini lipstick sets, polishes and polish set, brush kits, nail wraps, a gel liner set, a few false lashes and some sundries like sponges and mirrors. Tiana, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Aurora, Mulan, Alice and Cruella are featured, and I also went on a Disney cruise and noticed some glosses featuring characters that I didn't see in the parks, such as Minnie Mouse and the Blue Fairy, (no male characters, however). Some of the range occasionally pops up in UK Disney Stores, and they are also sometimes available in some of the outlets in the I-Drive area in Orlando as well.

 

Aaaanyway. Due to luggage constraints and not wanting to smash any powder products, I picked up six of the lipglosses! I honestly would have bought them all, and I’m planning to collect more in the future. Each gloss is named for a character, with that character displayed on the tube, and a sticker on the top of the tube and box displays a symbol matching the character as well - a rose for Belle, an apple for Snow White, etc. Generally speaking the shade of the gloss matches the characters personality or the themes for that film - for instance, the Maleficent gloss is purple, Ariel’s is a coral shade, the Rapunzel shade matched the pink of her dress. A+ for packaging and theme here, there are a lot of nice touches for Disney fans and I prefer this packaging, even though it’s just stickers, to both the MAV Villains and Maleficent collection packaging. I feel more thought has gone into it.

Let’s have a close look at each one!

Mistress of Darkness (Maleficent)

A bright purple in the tube, this translates to a sheerer lilac on the lips. Your natural tone will show through, which makes this look pinker. The gloss has very small reddish gold sparkles in which don’t translate very well in photos.

Change Your Fate (Merida)

A decently pigmented orange-red gloss, I predict lots of wear out of this one!

Love’s First Kiss (Snow White)

A dusky pink. I love this shade, it’s very feminine and pretty. If you’re surprised Snow White’s shade isn’t red, it’s probably because Disney gave a red gloss to Cruella.

Mysterious Mermaid (Ariel)

A pale pinky-coral with gold sparkles. Again, one I can see myself getting a lot of wear out of.

A Rose Is A Rose (Belle)

A mauvey pink. I think this is the sort of shade Belle might actually wear. I really, really love this one!

Heartless (Wicked Queen)

A vampy blackened red. How great is this? Glad to see there is at least one shade in the range that will suit darker skin tones or bolder looks!

 

And just for comparisons sake:

In all honesty, I wasn't expecting too much of these glosses at all, I fell in love with packaging and wanted to add them to my makeup collection. The Maleficent colour is much sheerer than purple lovers would hope, and I expected the rest of the glosses to follow suit. While most of the ones I’ve got are on the sheerer side, these are actually nice quality, with some pretty sophisticated shades! I love the dusky tone of ‘Love’s First Kiss’ and it’s hard to find anything negative to say about the stunning vampy qualities of Heartless – neither of which are shades I would have expected to find in a cartoon themed line, even if it is obviously geared at adults. As glosses, you’re not going to get stunning wear time out of these, but none of them stain or feather, and they are all lightweight and non-sticky which is great.

At $14.95 plus tax, these aren’t the cheapest of glosses (although some places in the parks they are on Buy Two, Get One Free) but as a beautiful Disney souvenir it was a price I was more than willing to pay and I was pleasantly surprised at how lovely these are.

Would you buy Disney makeup?

MAC Viva Glam Rihanna Lipstick and Lipglass

Happy Monday everyone, let’s do some lipstick swatches! Hurrah! I have both items from Viva Glam Rihanna, a lipstick and a tinted lipglass.



Oooh, innit gorgeous? These two have the same sort of soft touch rubbery-velvety packaging as the Temperature rising collection from summer 2013 and they are just lovely. Viva Glam lipsticks normally have a little red band on them, so I like that they kept a red colour to the packaging. Riri fans will like the addition of her signature on the bottle of the lipglass and the twist-up part of the lipstick.



Viva Glam Rihanna Tinted Lipglass. What a gorgeous finish on this one!

Viva Glam Rihanna lipstick. This is a Frost finish and has a gorgeous strawberry tone to it.



Both products layered together.



Unnecessary hand swatch.



Both products layered.

Aren’t they lovely? I think I may actually prefer the lipglass slightly out of the two, but they’re both so pretty and girly. I’m glad MAC is finishing up their run of products with Rihanna with a Viva Glam collection. I’m a huge fan of Viva Glam, and I’m glad to see them bringing back some colours that are more likely to suit a huge range of skintones (*cough all the VG Nicki  and VG Gagas*), which the permanent line of VG colours are supposed to. It’s  worth noting that in the promo pictures, Rihanna is wearing Brick lipliner blended into the lipstuck, so the look in the promos is a little different – there’s a face chart and instructions  on the MAC site. I’ll have to try the look soon as it’s gorgeous

The lipstick costs £15 and the tinted lipglass costs £14, with all proceeds going to help men, women and children living with HIV and AIDs. Yes, these are dupeable colours, but as it’s for charity you’ll get no suggestions from me! It is a limited edition collection, but I believe it’s sticking around for the year, so you’ve plenty of time to go and get it!

Have you picked this up?What’s your favourite Viva Glam Lipstick?

Illamasqua Intense Lipglosses

Illamasqua are well known for their bold campaigns and fearless colour choices in their products and in my opinion, nothing embodies that view of the brand more than their Intense Lipglosses. I own eight of these beauties and I thought I would share just how gorgeous they are!

L-R: Boost, Touch, Shoot, Wanderlust, Violate, Galactic.

 

 

 

This is Shoot – isn’t she gorgeous? This is a newer addition to my little collection and I bought her for shoots, so I haven’t really worn her yet. She’s almost totally opaque, but due to the unusual colour I would recommend wearing a green eyeliner on the lips so if the colour moves around, you won’t see any pink underneath from your natural lip (which can really ruin the look of a green shade!)

 

This is Touch, from the 2014 I’m The One collection for Valentines Day. Not as unique as some of the Intense Lipglosses but certainly gorgeous! This has a lovely shimmer to it.

 

This is Boost – applied alone, and over a deep brown liner. Don’t you just love a duochrome? People went nuts for Boost when it was released and for good reason – it’s beautiful! This is fairly sheer for an Intense Lipgloss which tend to be thicker, but I suppose the effect is quite intense! I love the versatility of this shade.

 

 

 

Next up is Violate, one of my favourite Illamasqua products ever. I think this shade is really glamorous, and layered over a red is actually beautifully wearable. This isn’t fully opaque but you can get away with wearing it on your own.

 

 

From the Creator collection, this is Wanderlust. I LOVE this shade – if you like the brown shades of the 90’s revival that’s been going on in the makeup world, this is a really nice, different addition to that sort of trend. I can’t wait to use this shade on a model with deeper skin. And on a model with pale, pale skin. I just love it!

 

 

This is Galactic – very cool, but very strange! It doesn’t seem to have a base colour and seems to be made up of silver particles - if you click to see a bigger picture, you can see what I mean. This means it's hard to get a crisp line, but it's worth the work.

 

 

This is, Absorb. Alone, it’s.. well, on me it’s quite frankly nasty and a little um, biological, but it’s a great mixing shade, so I’ve kept it hanging around! Again, pigmented and glossy.

I *think* this may be Frenzy, but the label has worn off of this one so I’m not too sure. Sorry! However, I wanted to include it to show you again how lovely and pigmented these glosses are.

So there you are, thems my babies! The Intense Lipglosses do vary – some are sheerer than others, some have more of a creme finish for example – but on they whole they tend to be very pigmented, slightly thicker lipglosses that are nonetheless comfortable to wear and with fairly decent staying power. Out of these, Boost is probably the one I have to reapply most often. At £14.50, they’re certainly not the cheapest lipglosses on the market but if you want an unusual colour, I really don’t think you’ll find better quality. The only negative thing about these is that since they changed the packaging, sometimes the brushes in them are splayed which is very frustrating. However, because of the pigmentation of these glosses, you may wish to apply them with your favourite lip brush anyway.

Facade, Gender, Stranger and Absorb are next on my list. Do you have any of this range?

L’Oreal Colour Riche Extraordinaire lipglosses in Nude Vibrato and Rose Symphony

These interesting little pots are a new addition to the L’Oreal line, with L’Oreal claiming “Lips become extraordinary with new Extraordinaire by Colour Riche™. The new vision of lip colour features luxurious micro-oils that infuse each pigment for ultimate colour richness.” I saw the word ‘oil’ along with the YSL-esque packaging and was immediately intrigued. There are 16 shades in the range, and of course my Boots only had about six, and neither of those were the orange or purple. Boo!



The packaging remind me almost of nail polish bottles – these are really chunky! At first glance they look pretty luxurious but the colour on them is a plastic insert, which is very odd as when you unscrew the lid, the screw part is clear plastic which allows you to see the product colour as well. Very strange. these come with a doefoot applicator.



The shades I have are Nude Vibrato and Rose Symphony. All the colours in the range are classical music themed.



Rose Symphony is a gorgeous, bright clean rose-pink shade.



Nude Vibrato (I keep typing ‘Vibrator’) is a light pink-based nude. Swatched on my hand, this has more of a brown or peach tone, but reads pinker on my lips.

Wearing ‘Nude Vibrato.’

These feel very unusual on the lips – my first reaction to them was not good - they feel almost plasticy! This gives them that gorgeous vinyl look but I wasn’t sure about it at first at all! I got over the feeling and they’re pretty comfortable to wear. My lips were quite dry for these above swatches and you can see they didn’t accentuate that – I actually find them quite moisturizing! They’re not as liquid as a regular gloss, so while they’re not sticky or tacky I get decent wear from these and they don’t slide around on the lip. It’s a new texture to me and it’s quite hard to describe. The shine wears away somewhat but you’ll get a good couple of hours.

I can see these being very popular and I would be tempted to try out the orange and purple shade if I see them and they have nice tones to them. I’m not head over heels with these, but I do like them and they’ll be perfect to join my little arsenal at work.

I bought these on an introductory offer, but I recall they were £8.99 each – I can’t find them online yet. Will you be trying them?

Quickie Review: Bobbi Brown High Shimmer Lipgloss in Black Ruby

I’ve done gone all fancy! After falling in love with a Chanel Glossimer I received as a Christmas gift, I had a hankering to try some more brands of high-end gloss and this little number from Bobbi Brown caught my eye.

 

 

The packaging for the Bobbi Brown glosses is really nothing to write home about. It’s sleek enough I suppose, but there’s something about it that considering it’s price point is a little disappointing. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

 

Here’s a very thin layer of the gloss…

 

 

…and a thicker layer. Bobbi Brown describes this as ‘“crimson with gold pearl’'” which I think is pretty much spot on. The gold sparkles aren’t hugely apparent but they really add to the shine of the product and make it look much more luxurious on the lip.  I would have thought ‘Black Ruby’ would have been a little deeper but I guess this could be described as a slightly blackened red. It’s a beautiful shade and one that'll go well with a simple taupe eye and a slick of eyeliner.



In my opinion, if a gloss doesn’t look better layered you’ve pissed your money away, and I found a perfect pairing for Black Ruby with a 99p liner from LA Colours, of all things! It’s a slightly metallic red-plum shade (the name’s worn off) and this is how I’ve been wearing Black Ruby. This combination got a lot of face time over Christmas!

This is a gorgeous colour and I’m pleased I bought it, but something about this one doesn’t make me want to rush down the to Bobbi Brown counter for more. The shimmer is gorgeous but the sheen of the gloss itself could be more shiny for me. I'd expect something more reflective for a 'high shimmer' gloss. It’s not gritty but I do notice that after wearing it, some glitter/shimmer is left on my lips which quite frankly is annoying.  The gloss is non-sticky, buildable and has a really pleasant mint scent. It’s a pretty darn nice product, but for the price I’d rather spend an extra £3 and get another Chanel Glossimer instead.


Bobbi Brown High Shimmer Lipglosses cost £18.00 and I got mine from House of Fraser.

Quickie review: Chanel Levres Scintillantes Glossimer in Savage Grace

For Christmas, the lovely Rachael sent me a gorgeous package full of the most adorable Sanrio candy (if you think that’s still around you’ve got another think coming!) and this absolute stunner of a gloss from Chanel! I was very touched she sent me something so lovely and was really excited to wear it!

 

 

That double C, though. Chanel makeup just makes me feel damn fancy, there’s no two ways about it! So, the packaging is undeniably beautiful, what does it look like on the lip?

 

 

 

Click to embiggen and see the sparkle! This is one layer of the gloss applied using the doefoot wand it comes with. Chanel describes Savage Grace as a ‘deep shimmering garnet.’ Garnet, Chanel? Garnet is red, homeslices. This shit is pink. And a beautiful pink at that.

 

And just for funsies, here it is layered over MAC Rebel lipstick. If this isn’t a damn gorgeous pairing I don’t know what is!

 

 

One swipe of this leaves a gorgeous colour pay-off and for a gloss, I’m really impressed with how it wears. It’s a fairly thin formula so it doesn’t feel goopy. It’s slightly tacky and I would recommend the finger trick as I got a little on my teeth the first time I wore it, but I wouldn’t say it was sticky. It’s non-gritty and doesn’t have a scent or taste to speak of. I’m much more of a lipstick person than a gloss person but I can really, really see why these are so popular – the formula is wonderful and if the rest of the shades are this gorgeous I think I’m in trouble! Yes, for a gloss it’s pricey but if you fall in love with a shade, I think it’s worth it.

Have you tried any Chanel glosses? Any recommendations?

Chanel Glossimers can be bought from Boots for £21.00