Jen Thomas

I’m hardly what you would call a shrinking violet in the dress sense stakes, but it’s only in the last 6 months that I’ve started to be more adventurous with my lipstick, ever since I fell in love with ‘Heroine’ from MAC. This spawned a love of unnatural and bold lipsticks – so you can imagine my excitement when I saw the Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics Lip Tars new 2014 range for autumn, Unknown Pleasures. Featuring purples, blues, oranges, and rose golds in metallic and matte shades, I made a beeline for ‘Pagan’, a matte purple, ‘Vain’ a matte indigo blue, and ‘Techopagan’ a metallic purple. On recommendation from make up artist friends I picked up the OCC Lip Tar Primer too.

On first glance the tubes seem teeny tiny, and each comes with a small OCC lip brush. However, a little goes a very long way with these lip colours, and it allows you to build the intensity as you wish, and blend the shades together too. I applied the primer first as per instructions, leaving it to sink in for a few minutes before blotting the excess. I decided to go for ‘Vain’ first of all, and left the rest of my skin clean with an application of mascara. Now, I’m rarely ever seen without eyeliner, so this mascara only look is alien to me and caused great amusement with my family – “You look like bambi….with hypothermia.” Excellent. Just the look I was going for.

All of these photos are without lipliner of any kind, just the primer and the lip tar. This morning I had a play with applying the metallic ‘Technopagan’ first, and then blended the matte ‘Pagan’ in the middle, and I reckon a small amount of the metallic over my beloved MAC ‘Heroine’ would also look great and add depth. It’s interesting to see the difference in the shades in indoor and outdoor light, daylight brings out a teal tone to ‘Vain’ which is very pretty.

The lip tars are moisturing, with surprisingly next to no feathering or bleeding despite not using a liner. Vain did stain quite a lot even with the primer – but rubbing gently with a toothbrush removed the worst of it and my lips felt softer even before the impromptu toothbrush exfoliation. Beware of getting any in your mouth, unless it’s Halloween, green tinged teeth aren’t going to bring suitors flocking.

Pagan is a beautiful deep purple, and it’s easy to build an ombré look by building up the colour with the brush. Technopagan has an intense metallic sheen to it without being tacky, and I can see them being solid favourites to experiment with. It’s easy to go full on goth with false lashes, lots of eyeliner and dark brows, but I think they worked surprisingly well with just mascara too if you wanted a more toned down look (as toned down as you can get with bright blue lips anyway.) I’ll definitely be investigating some of their other purple and lilac shades, the brighter the better. For now my not-so-inner vamp is very happy indeed, and a new convert to OCC.