OCC Lip Tar in Vintage - Review, Swatches and Photos

Jill and I were in New York City for the Victoria Day long weekend (that's the Canadian holiday celebrating Queen Victoria's birthday on the last Monday before May 25 each year) and we took the opportunity while there to visit the OCC store on Manhattan's Lower East Side. 

Tucked onto a great little street is the OCC head office. We got there just before closing on Saturday night and probably annoyed the staff who were trying to clean up and close up to get out for their Saturday night. But we weren't going to rush that much. OCC is only available online in Canada although a handful of their lip tars can be found at Sephora stores. I wanted to swatch!!! I wanted to check out their concealers and loose colours and Jill hadn't ever tried any OCC products, so she wanted to check out everything.

Sadly, the new Stained Glosses weren't out yet so we didn't get to see/swatch those, but we had plenty to get excited about without them.

I ended coming home with a pot of concealer, Flawed loose colour, Zoom Zooms nail polish and Vintage lip tar. I'll review Flawed and Zoom Zooms in separate posts but let's take a look at Vintage.

Vintage is a lip tar I've read a fair bit about. I think it's safe to say it's one of OCC's most popular shades. I have number of the other lip tars, but since I'd ordered them online and didn't get to swatch them first, I played it safe with pinks and corals. Reds can be finicky colours to wear so you definitely should swatch them and/or try them on before buying.

As you can see in the above photo, OCC lip tars now come with a mini lip brush in little plastic cases with an instruction/information card. This is a very good idea considering that while these might look like a tube of lipgloss, they are not. A very little amount of lip tar goes a very long way and a lip brush is your best friend for applying it. 

Also, since I last bought OCC lip tars, they've changed their packaging. I photographed Vintage with one of my older lip tars (I think it's Anime - all the names of my lip tars have worn off, sadly) to show the change. The tubes are now opaque and the tips are no longer a large deer foot shape. With the old packaging, it's tempting to apply the product straight from the tube, like you would a lip gloss, but trust me, you don't want to do that. Waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much product on the lips doing it that way! With the skinnier tip you have better control with how much product comes out and it encourages you to use a lip brush too. 

I talked more about the OCC lip tars in this post if you're interested in learning more about them. I won't go into as much detail here. But, I highly recommend checking them out at your local Sephora or on their website. These are great, high-quality, vegan, healthy lip colours, although they're not for the faint of heart. These are not sheer, natural shades. 

Anyway, Vintage is just as you might guess from the name, a darkened red, like you might imagine a singer in a 1920s nightclub wearing. OCC describes it as a "deep, true burgundy".

It's definitely a deeper colour than a true red, but burgundy? I don't think it looks very burgundy on me.  When I think burgundy, I think purpley-red, like red wine. This looks to me like a bright red with brown and purple added, just enough to deepen the red slightly but not enough to dim the brilliance of the red.

See?It looks almost like a drop of blood on my hand.

Less like blood when swatched out but you can see the purple to it here. It's almost like true blue-red only slightly deeper.

That was a tiny drop on my hand and that's how much it is when spread out. This stuff is crazy-pigmented!

And here it is on me. 

In these photos, it's looking more like a true red, when in actuality it's deeper, more purple-brown-red. I love this colour. It's fantastically vampy. I'm one of those people for whom putting on red lipstick changes their personality. It makes me feel instantly sophisticated, sultry and fierce. Even with crazy curls in my hair!

In terms of application, lip tars are tricky and Vintage is no different. You have to go slow and start small. Vintage is like a liquid red lipstick. No messing around here! Using a lip pencil would be a smart thing, although I didn't in the photos here. And the lip tars last. They're quite wet when you first apply it but they dry down. As you might guess, they last a good long time too. No reapplication necessary for a number of hours for me. 

Here's where I kissed my hand after wearing Vintage for about 30 minutes. It's still fully intact on my lips but look at how little comes off.

I'll be wearing Vintage a lot, I think. 

Grade: A+

Studio Girl Make-Up Kit

I attended a lecture on 1950s fashion at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto last weekend. The woman who spoke is the owner of a vintage store called Gadabout Vintage and she had brought some 1950s clothes and accessories with her to show us. One of the items was this make-up kit from Studio Girl. I fell in love with all the little bottles inside - many of which still had product inside.

The tall glass bottles with the white lids in the back of the top shelf were cologne and the white jar containers contained what I suspect were creams and lotions. The tiny vials along the front of the top shelf were cosmetics. I think they were foundations, concealers and cream colours to that effect. See the reddish colours? These were probably used as blush. The vials to the right were likely for concealing and highlighting. There's a small gold tube of lipstick, still mostly intact, on the bottom of the case. It was a deep, bright red, called True Red. Very Marilyn Monroe. 

How delightful to see what women in the 1950s would have bought and used. 

C.

Beauty Squared Round-Up - April 15, 2012

Here are Beauty Squared's weird and wonderful beauty links for the week:

Who doesn't want to look a little like the gorgeous Sophia Loren? Sam from Pixiwoo shows how to get an "Ultra Vixen" eye look just like Sophia.

Have you seen the Sephora/Pantone collaboration and aren't sure how to wear tangerine tango? A Sephora make-up artist shows you how. 

Candy inspired manicures.

A cold cream from the 1950s that can remove radioactive dirt from your face.

Make-up artist Larissa Palaszczuk reviews the FaceChartPro iPad app.

A manicure that mimics caviar - not sure about this one. But here's a blog that shows you how to do it yourself.

Former plus-size model Crystal Renn is unrecognizable now with bleached hair and eyebrows and a size 0 frame.

Would you let your significant other do your make-up? This brave beauty blogger let her husband do a Snooki transformation on her, on camera. 

1920s and 1930s Make-Up

This summer I was challenged to come up with two retro looks - one for a coworker who was attending a 1930s themed fashion event and one for myself, for a friend's 1920s themed party.

I have a soft spot for history and when we were taught the basics of beauty through the years in make-up school, I absorbed it like a sponge and have never forgotten it. I love Sam from PixiWoo for her retro make-up looks and used her videos in my research such as this one for the 1920s look (sorry about the size of this video!):



Make-up in the 1920s was very basic so women did what they could. As is the case now, what was in vogue was the faces of movies stars such as Clara Bow and Louise (LuLu) Brooks. 1920s make-up was inspired by silent film where the face was used in lieu of voices to express emotion and make-up had to stand out on B&W film. 

Clara Bow

Louise Brooks

The flapper was the IT girls of the decade with her close cropped, bobbed hair, dropwaist dresses, long beaded necklaces or pearls and cloche hats.

Why so glum, Flapper girl? I covet your boots and adorable hair!

One of my favourite photos of all time.

Louise Brooks

1920s make-up basics:

• big, sad eyes
• low, straight, thin, dark brows
• pale, matte skin
• dark red, bow-shaped lips
• no blush

Me with my test flapper make-up

Me at the party
Taken by Beverly Wooding 

I have a face with strong features but I managed to get the 1920s look without too much difficulty.

Here's what I did:

I thinned my brows out as much as I was comfortable wearing (which wasn't anywhere near as thin or straight as they wore them in the 1920s) and used a dark brown powder to darken, lower and extend them. For my eyes, I used MAC's Smut eyeshadow in an oval shape but in the complete opposite way as I would normally apply it. Starting on my lid, I blended the colour up high in the crease and inner corner and worked it down at the outside of my eye to create a downturned, sad look. I smudged a soft line of Smut below my eyes, also pulling it down at the outer corner. To make my eyes appear larger I lined my lower waterline with Benefit EyeBright to make my eyes appear larger and added a little mascara, but not as much as I normally wear.

My base was as matte as I could make it (lots of powder) and I applied no blush or highlighter.

For my lips, I used MAC's Diva matte lipstick but first applied concealer to the each side of my mouth. The 1920s lip was known as the Bow, after Clara Bow and drawn well inside the natural lip line. Lip colours didn't bleed as quickly when done this way. I used a freshly sharpened lip pencil to draw the shape and then used a lip brush to apply the lipstick.

MAC Smut eyeshadow and MAC Diva matte lipstick

The 1930s look I gave my coworker Lindsay instruction for was inspired by this video from Helena Rubenstein and from Kevyn Aucoin's books. I think Marlene Dietrich was one of the most stunning women to grace the big screen and I have a huge retro girl-crush on her.

Can you see why?

Marlene Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress

Her face was the epitome of sculpted, otherworldly beauty with a good dose of androgyny as her face is almost handsome. She was in control of her own make-up and hair and worked mainly with directors, wardrobe stylists and technicians who knew how to make her look her very best onscreen.

Again, I went to PixiWoo for inspiration (sorry about the size of this video!):



Her high, thin, arched brows, sculpted bone structure, bedroom eyes and flawless skin were hallmarks of the 1930s look but it's easy just to focus on that face. Other beauties of the decade were:

Greta Garbo

Joan Crawford - look a brunette!

Joan Crawford again, this time as a blonde.

Carole Lombard (with Clark Gable)

The 1930s were softer in terms of hair and make-up than the 1920s. Advances had been made in beauty products, although they were still pretty basic. There had been huge advances in film though, in terms of lighting and cameras, so rather than the almost two-dimensional visuals of cinema in the 1920s, the 1930s gave us the beginning of Hollywood's Golden Age and the first of the incredibly glamourous movie stars.

This is another good video although it has no sound and the model has the perfect face for this type of make-up so it's easy to make her look like a 1930s film star.



The basics of the 1930s look:

• glamour
• shadow and highlight
• liquid eyeliner 
• high, thin, rounded eyebrows
• red lips
• sculpted cheekbones
• soft pink blush

I didn't do Lindsey's make-up but I gave her lots of instruction and here's what she did all on her own! She looks great! She also has a great face for this look - delicate features, a rounded face with short blonde hair to frame it. I don't know what products she used, but it appears she used a thin line of liquid eyeliner, a touch of blush and that fantastic red lipstick (it's MAC's Ruby Woo, she tells me).

Lindsey with her 1930s look.
Taken by Jonathan Loek and posted on BlogTO.

Another photo of Lindsey taken by photographer Claudia Hung can be seen here.

1930s make-up is much more flattering than the 1920s look but since both of these looks were meant for B&W photos and film, you can play with texture and modernize these both for today. Lindsey too didn't tweeze the life out of her eyebrows to get the perfect look but this is a look she could wear again on a night out.

Coincidentally it's been a summer for retro make-up looks - so much fun!!!

C.