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+
