Urban Decay Revolution High-Color Lipgloss Swatches

Urban Decay’s Revolution High-Color Lipglosses (SGD$33).
These gorgeous tubes of sheeny shiny color are out in the US, but won’t hit the stores until 11 June 2015 in Singapore.

In the meantime, whether you’re shopping online in the US, or considering some of the shades before they are available in stores, you might find swatches on the skin a bit more useful than the digital swatches they have online.

The official shade swatches you see above are a good bit darker than the actual glosses in real life, so if you're trying to decide based on a picture like this, you are likely to be a bit surprised when you get the actual product. Also, you can't tell how sheer or opaque they are against the skin. These are High-color glosses, and they ARE more pigmented than the typical gloss, but they also aren’t all equally pigmented. Some are sheerer than others. Especially the shimmery shades, which is typical of most glosses. 

Fact: When you add a lot of opaque non-sparkly pigments in a formula to make it opaque, they can "muddy"-up and dull the shine of the sparkle pigments. Kinda like dropping glitter in cloudy water. So for the sparkle to shine through, brands often have to keep the base translucent, or else throw in SO much sparkly mica that the product can feel slightly gritty and sometimes harder to work with. Hence, in most "intense" gloss ranges, the sparkly glosses will always be slightly translucent.

Now I’ve only had a chance to play with these on the hand, not wear them on the lips myself, so this isn’t a full review, but I’m pretty impressed with the colors (these shades are gorgeous), and also the fact that the textures aren’t super sticky and heavy on the lips. They aren’t lightweight like Cremesheen Glasses or Lancome Liplovers. Maybe something like Chanel Rouge Allure Glosses. The color payoff is also similar.

I can't tell you what shades are my fave. It's too hard to pick because these are actually all gorgeous. I would say since this is a high-color gloss range, don't play it safe and keep buying the nudes and soft pinks. (You can get those shades from any drugstore brand.) Try a bright magenta pink like Scandal, a rich red like Brickhouse, one of the beautifully sparkly sheer shades like Big Bang and Vice, or even step out of your comfort zone and try Bittersweet, a bright grape-candy purple which is the campaign color for the range, which is actually incredibly flattering.