NV Colour Felt Tip Eyeliner Pen - Blue Velvet Swatches & Review

Provided for review

Hey lovelies,

Here's my final NV Colour review for a while! So far my favourite item from my first experience with the brand has been the Cheeky Stick in Chilli Chops (reviewed here). Until recently the Felt Tip Eyeliner Pen in Blue Velvet was a close second but has instead served as a reminder as to why I like to test things multiple times and really get a feel for the product before reviewing...

Felt tip eyeliner pens are hands down my favourite kind and NV's take is pretty typical of the genre, a long skinny pen with a felt tip that is flexible but firm enough to manipulate. It comes boxed, which is a nice touch.

Swatched on bare skin under daylight bulbs

The colour pay off is lovely and intense in the arm swatch - above I've squiggled a line (one pass) and built up the colour beneath (several passes). Where Blue Velvet seems to struggle is over eyeshadow. It was workable for the look below, taking a few passes to build to opacity as it was prone to dragging across the eyeshadow. I was wearing a glittery ColourPop shadow (I Heart This) so I figured the texture might throw it off a little.

The next time I went to use it, I was using two of the shimmers from the Urban Decay Naked 2 palette, eyeshadows with smooth textures and no glitter in sight. This time it dragged, skipped and tugged painfully as I tried in vain to get it to draw a line. I tried altering the amount of pressure I was using, swiping it on the back of my hand but it seemed to have a waxy dryness to the formula that wasn't there before. I gave up and went over my attempts with black liner instead.

After a few more weeks I tried again and when swiped on the back of my hand it seemed to have recovered somewhat but remained sheer and difficult to apply to my lids. At a loss, I dropped some Clear Eyes on the tip and that got it working again, but quite frankly this is not something that should need to be done after ONE successful use for any product, whether budget friendly or high end. It's just not excusable at any price point. I sincerely hope this was an anomaly and not the norm for these eyeliners, but I'm not game to drop $14 on another shade to find out. During the time that I succesfully wore Blue Velvet, I was impressed that it didn't fade, crack or crease.

On the whole I'm incredibly disappointed with this eyeliner and it's such a shame because I was SO in love with it upon first application. I'm not even usually a blue fan, but the subtle hint of blue that Blue Velvet provides and its depth had me really excited to use it more. Know of any other midnight blue liquid eyeliners that I should check out?