With love, from Portland: Portland Black Lipstick Company

On Saturday evening I returned from a week and half vacation to the beautiful city of Portland, Oregon. I stayed with my wonderful cousin Ayla, and was supposed to be in Spokane, Washington for part of the trip to visit with my friend and her new baby. Unfortunately, even though I specifically said she had better have her baby by the time I got there(jokes,) she was still quite pregnant during my visit. (She did actually end up having a little girl on the 27th of February, and I am pleased as punch to report that, despite my sadness at just missing her.) So poor Ayla had to put up with me for ten whole days. Luckily she is one of my best friends so hopefully she didn't want to murder me in the night too much..

Anyway, a lot of my trip I spent just sorta exploring the city, which was gorgeous. Everyone kept saying I had come at a terrible time, which was probably true, because it was winter. Now, don't get me wrong, it was pretty damn cold, but I love gloomy weather. Truth be told, living in San Francisco, my favorite times are when it is foggy out. Don't get me wrong, the days in Portland when it was sunny, I was probably in better spirits, but there is something that will always be romantic to me about weather that is a touch melodramatic.

For this post, I would like to talk about the scavenger hunt I went on to find a certain brand of lipstick that I assumed would be easy to find, Portland Black Lipstick Company. During my hunt, I managed to track down three shops that carried this amazing lipstick: Yo Vintage, which has most of them, Blush Beauty Bar, which mainly carrier their reds, and Wells and Verne, which had a few of the staples.

Words cannot describe how amazing these lipsticks are. They are so pigmented it is out of this world. I found about this brand a year or two ago from one of my friends (it was either my twin Ashley or my old coworker Tiara,) and my wonderful twin was the one who reminded me to look for them while I was visiting.

It was a pretty hilarious thing to do, to search a city for lipstick, but it was so very, very worth it. The colors I ended up taking home with me: the classic Black, which is the most pigmented black I have come across to date. Difficult Island, the color of a bright piece of turquoise with a touch of glitter. Lux et Voluptas, which is a soft pink with a gold shimmer that seems to radiate off of it. Artificial Amethyst,  a metallic dark purple with a bit of glitter to it. I also bought Gilded Lilly(a gold, as I've been searching for a gold lipstick my whole life) and Indigo Bridge, a dark metallic blue with a bit of glitter, similar to that of Artificial Amethyst, in my humble opinion, these last two I have yet to test out.

The black I have pictured first was straight from the tube, a Chapstick style design, my only complaint about these amazing creations, as it makes application a little tricky. But to be honest, I like a bit of a challenge, and I think for anything that is this amazing, a person should have to work a little harder for.

The second picture of the black is five hours of wear without any touch ups, and after eating dinner and pie.

These lipsticks are all natural, and as each of the three owners of the three shops I found them at, "made in the kitchen of the house of the woman who makes them." Two thumbs way, way up for this fantastic company and their amazing product.