In my mind, Jean Queen is not just about complimentary shades of pink lipstick and blue fabric. It’s about the aesthetic of the denim-wearing girl: easy-going, ready-to-wear, “casual pretty.”

As with all Lipstick Queen products, these are unscented. The lipstick is very sheer (though I do love the color, and it feels pleasant on the lips).

The gloss seems just a hair more cool-toned than the lipstick. It’s also (surprisingly) more opaque. The gloss tube has a brush-tip, but instead of click-pen packaging, you squeeze the tube to force gloss up onto the brush.

Both the lipstick and the gloss are $18 each, or you can buy them together on QVC for $22.80 + $3.97 shipping. (That’s $26.77 total, or $13.39 each if you want to split the set with a friend).

Black lipgloss is not over.

It enjoyed one season of revival in Fall/Winter ’09 — not a new concept then by any stretch. I bought my Lipstick Queen Black Shine gloss to pair with some opaque black lipstick, but it found another life as a lip-color mixer.

Black Shine dulls down and greys out other lip colors in interesting ways. I find it works best if I use a lip brush, stroking a SMALL amount gently over my lips and then applying lipstick on top. It’s easier to get a sheer look and this method seems to help keep coverage even.

Here’s a lip swatch Dior Peche Serum de Rouge, applied to bare lips. Below is a photo of it applied over a coat of Black Shine. From pretty bright medium pink, it turns into a greyed-out pink-mauve. Sophisticated and extremely wearable.

Black Shine will stick a little if you absolutely pile it on. Treat it like a sheer gloss and you shouldn’t have any stringy-lipgloss issues.

Black Shine is $22USD ($36AUD) for 0.494 oz (12.5 g) — a very generous size. Packaging is a screw-top clear plastic pot. If you have another black lipgloss, pass, but if you like playing with lip colors, this is a great product!

Anyway, here are the next third of LQ’s fabulous Fame glosses. I still think these are great. They’re entirely unsticky, unscented, and I even like the click pen applicator. Click here for arm swatches of all 15 shades, or click here for lip swatches of the first 5. The Fame glosses are $16.50 each.

6 Minutes is sheer coral.

7 Minutes is a sheer strawberry.

8 Minutes is cooler, bluer, more berry than 7.

9 Minutes is a sexy sheer scarlet.

10 Minutes is a cool pink.

1 Minute is a sheer, milky pale pink.

2 Minutes is a blue (cool) rose.

3 Minutes is a cool pink.

4 Minutes (my favorite so far) is peachy pink.

5 Minutes is a subtle/quiet warm, milky pink. It doesn’t add a lot of pigment — I’d say it’s my-lips-but-glossier.

And though I’m a huge fan of Lipstick Queen in general (click here for swatches of her Saints, Sinners, Medieval, Chinatown Pencils, Pop Art Glosses, and Butterfly Ball), I feel like I’m not quite getting it with these. The colors don’t seem distinct enough from one another, particularly in blush form. (Peach-rose, pink, tea rose, wine-rose?)

Did I swatch them wrong? Do they give you a perfect, natural flush? I’m so curious to hear what your experience with these has been.
Lipstick Queen Oxymoron Matte Gloss: Deafening Silence, Free Ride, Honest Politician, Minor Crisis

I hope you won’t let that keep me from telling you how impressed I am with these glosses.

I was definitely skeptical from the outset. I hate click pens, mostly because it’s so hard to dispense the right amount of product. Click-click nothing, click WOAH too much gloss. I’d also read that the 15 Minutes were nonsticky, and subliminally, I didn’t believe it. These days, companies use the descriptor “nonsticky” so blithely that it’s started to lose meaning for me.

But applying one of these to my lips was enough to make me a believer. The gloss comes out of the pen as a thick gel, which converts to a sheer, shiny gloss on your lips. Because of the thickness of the gloss, one click was enough to get me started, a second click was perfect to finish the job. I tried on 9 Minutes and it was like applying one of my favorite lipstains… in gloss form. They’re not actually staining, that’s just what the level of coverage reminded me of. The Pop Art Glosses are unscented, not the least bit sticky, and sheer cream finish (no sparkle).

I still want to show you a few lip swatches of these (because I think the lip swatches will really add to your understanding of what they look like), and I’ll be giving the rest away — watch for that giveaway in the near future.

15 Minutes of Fame Pop Art Glosses are $16.50 each, or you can buy a set of five minis (3 Minutes, 5 Minutes, 11 Minutes, 12 Minutes, and 13 Minutes) for $28. The glosses are here to stay; the set is limited edition for holiday.

Now the reason for the asterisk on sheerness. Trance and Float are obviously sheer. Goodbye, Moment, and Fly will be a little more pigmented on someone of my skintone (or paler), but they’ll be sheer on darker skintones.

I tried on Trance and really liked it (it’s that sheer strawberry jam look again), but now I’m conflicted because I’m still pining for a Chinatown glossy pencil. I can’t confirm that I perceived any teeth whitening wearing the Butterfly Ball… but maybe I’m just self-conscious about my teeth now.
Help me out, readers! Chinatown vs. Butterfly Ball: which should I get?

[edit: I did spring for Trance, and after wearing it a few times, I do feel that the lipstick actually has a sort of bluish cast to it, which I don't love against my skin (you know I'm a warm lips kind of girl). The formula does feel amazing though.]

Lipstick Queen: Butterfly Ball, Goodbye, Moment, Trance, Float, Fly

The results were totally worth the risk, because I got away with an armful of LQ’s Chinatown Glossy Pencils (which debuted this past spring).

Chinatown pencils are super soft, glossy, sheer… lipsticks? in chubby pencil form. (Perhaps analogous to YSL’s Gloss Volupte or Guerlain’s Kiss Kiss Baby Lipstick?) I thought they were weird at first, but now I think they’re sort of brilliant. A tube of lipstick this soft and sheer might be crushed as you apply it to your lips, but as pencils, the wood protects the product. And coloring your lips is oddly fun.

Anyway, they come in five bright, cheery — surprisingly moisturizing! — colors. I tried on (and loved) Chase, and now I want to try on Thriller, too. Chinatown pencils are unscented, $20 each, and come with their own chubby sharpener.

Chinatown Glossy Pencils: Mystery (isn’t it so much… more accessible a color than you thought it would be?), Thriller, Chase, Genre, Crime

Today’s lip swatch (and review) is from the lovely glossedup:
(See my on-arm Lipstick Queen Sinner swatches.)
Lipstick Queen is my favourite lipstick brand, so we’ll kick off with Rouge Sinner! A slightly deepened matte mid-red, it is fully opaque in one coat. It wears fantastically well and in my experience, neither dries out nor hydrates, wearing to almost a silk-powder-esque finish. The result is a lipstick that lasts at least six hours on me (no eating though) with minimal bleeding, even without liner. It’s not a true matte — there is a little sheen to it — and it’s a colour that would look best on warm-to-neutral ladies. (Cooler girls can look to Red Sinner.) There is no taste nor smell, and the Art Deco satin-finish packaging is gorgeous. The only issue that I’ve noticed is that the lipstick is prone to becoming a little “grainy,” with some product balling on the lipstick surface. This doesn’t affect application, and is not a preservation factor as I have seen it in near-new testers.

About the bonus two lipsticks… Black Tie Optional lipstick was sitting on the Saints and Sinners display unit, and since it comes in the same color tube as the Sinner lipsticks, I thought it was one of them. It’s not. Black Tie Optional is a mattifying black lipstick, meant to be worn on top of something else to make it extra sexy (kind of like Lancome’s Piha gloss).

Lipstick Queen also makes Medieval Lip Stain, a sheer red lipstick that turned out to be my favorite product from this brand. I think everyone in the world is looking for a sheer red lipstick — this could be it.

Lipstick Queen lipsticks are $18 each, and can be purchased through her website, Barneys New York’s website, and in a scattered selection of physical stores.
Lipstick Queen Sinner Lipstick: Coral Sinner, Berry Sinner, Natural Sinner, Nude Sinner, Pink Sinner, Rouge Sinner, Rose Sinner, Wine Sinner, Red Sinner, Rust Sinner, Medieval, Black Tie Optional