Illamasqua's Intense Lip Glosses are one of my favourite lip products ever, and are certainly the best lip glosses i've ever tried. They are unlike any other lip gloss i've tried in quality, longetivity, colour selection and pigmentation. I have a whole bunch of them now but i'm still not satisfied, i want every colour available! And then i want them to release some more!
The colours you can get just amaze me. White, grey, black, blue, green, purple, orange, silver and many more slightly less scary sounding colours like reds, pinks, nudes and browns. And all are completely opaque. Many a time i've seen a blue or green gloss and got excited only to discover they are so sheer that they aren't meant to impart any colour at all, just create the optical illusion of white teeth, or a red gloss that is opaque in the tube but sheer on the lips. With these glosses that absolutely isn't the case, they are thick and the colour you see in the tube is the colour you will get on your lips.
The formula is superb too, they don't feel like any other gloss i've tried, they're thick and a bit like a paint. It's really hard to explain it but they are sticky but not in the same way as other glosses i've tried. They're sticky because they stick on your lips, not because they stick your lips together. They're sort of 'waxy' but they really don't feel bad. Once they're on my lips i don't really notice them at all. They're also pretty transfer resistant, if you touch something with your lips a small amount will transfer, but it's such a small amount it doesn't often show. They last for hours on their own, or even longer over a lip pencil, definately the longest lasting lip gloss i've ever tried, generally on me a gloss will just disappear off my lips within about an hour. When they do begin to fade you're left with a stain of the colour. They smell like a sweet, fruity sherbet and taste very faintly of it too.
You can sheer them out easily by just using a tiny amount of the product and spreading it over the lips, or you can apply it thickly to get the colour in the tube. As well as being as opaque as a lipstick these are true 'glosses', they give a really great high shine.
The packaging isn't particularly exciting, a clear tube with a black lid and black text and comes in the classic Illamasqua black box with cream writing. While it's not super exciting it is very classy looking and as the colours of the gloss are so bright it could have been overkill if the packaging was very bright or strange looking. There is an angled applicator where the product comes out, but i always use a lip brush to apply these so i can't tell you have effective it is. I have one problem with the packaging though, the sticker on the back is the same for all colours but then has the name of the shade printed on top, and for some reason these names always rub off really easily. So it can be difficult to remember which colour is which, especially with similar colours.
You get 7ml of product in a tube for £12.50. This might not sound like much, but you only need a small bead of gloss to cover your lips, so it will last you a long, long time.
There are a few drawbacks with these though, they are pretty high-maintenance, they tend to feather on me (but then again EVERYTHING feathers on me) and even if i do the finger-in-the-mouth trick i often still end up with gloss on my teeth, and as it's so richly pigmented it shows as badly as a lipstick.
But i love, love, love these so much and as you can see i've got a really large collection, but i still want more! I would absolutely recommend these to anyone who loves bright coloured lips or glosses and wants to try something new.
I have lip swatches of all the colours i own
Here
Now there are only a few left i
want need to get!
Tonnes more under the cut :)
