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Wet n Wild Liquid Catsuit in Shady Witch (and a New Wave Halloween)

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In the past five years or so, I've owned at least one dark lipstick in almost every color family: red, purple, pink, plum, brown, even blue and gray. Until this year, though, I had never bought a true black lipstick. Black lips were a little too predictably goth, too Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way . A dark brown or dark red was arty, my hipster brain told me. It was historical, because I could point to the same colors in illustrations from the '20s. Dark shades of traditional lipstick colors made me feel more mature: that is, as mature as an overeducated, underemployed, indebted millennial could feel. By contrast, black lipstick evoked nothing so much as a My Chemical Romance concert in 2006. But my prejudices vanished one late-September Sunday in the beauty section of Target, when I came upon Wet n Wild's Halloween collection and spotted a sparkly black liquid lipstick . I had resisted non-sparkly black lipsticks by dozens of brands, but I was powerless against b
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Astrology by Bite: A Rant

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As I'm sure you've heard by now, Bite Beauty has almost finished releasing a series of twelve Amuse Bouche lipsticks inspired by the signs of the zodiac. Bite started with Aquarius in January, and they're now two signs from the end, having just revealed Scorpio on Thursday. (If you're curious about Sagittarius and Capricorn, Trendmood has leaked all twelve shades here .) Like any other enamel-pin-collecting queer millennial, I enjoy astrology. I don't believe in it, per se, but I'm a Scorpio with Pisces rising and Aries moon, and that combination of signs is pretty damned accurate for my personality. (I didn't identify with Aries until I caught myself saying to my boyfriend, "I don't have anger issues; I'm just angry all the time.") So I've been following Bite's releases all year, initially with eager anticipation, then with increasing bafflement, and now with outright annoyance. The Astrology by Bite series was a great idea that co
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Pumpkin-Walnut-Chocolate-Chip Cookies 2.0

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Almost exactly four years ago , I posted my recipe for pumpkin-walnut-chocolate-chip cookies, which I've made at least once every autumn since, including this morning. These cookies are my humble attempt to replicate the ones that used to be (and still are, for all I know) sold at the coffee shop in my college library. Here's today's iteration: I've tweaked the recipe a bit since 2014, so I thought I'd post an update for those of you interested in making them, which everyone should be. Note that the walnuts and chocolate chips aren't mandatory at all (though they are, of course, highly recommended). INGREDIENTS: 1 cup plain canned pumpkin (this is a little less than a standard 15-oz. can) 1/2 cup sugar (you can use a bit less or more, depending on preferred sweetness level and presence/absence of chocolate chips. I used 1/2 cup today and wish I'd used less) 1/3 cup vegetable oil 1 egg 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 tsp. baking powder  1 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. m
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Glosses of Autumn, Part 1: Bite Prismatic Pearl Gloss in Rose Pearl

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I'm back, bearing makeup! For the first time in the 4.5-year history of Auxiliary Beauty, I went over a month without blogging. A lot happened in those six weeks: I moved to a new apartment with my boyfriend; finished my summer job at a university office and began an adjunct gig in Jersey City; got more serious about my creative writing and completed a short story for the first time in nearly a decade; and prepared my materials for one last go at the academic job market. So, yeah, not a lot of time for blogging. Now that things have settled down a bit, I'm hoping I can return to my schedule of two or three posts per month. Oh, and I made it through my August replacement-only no-buy successfully...well, sort of. I placed a ColourPop order at 8:30 pm on August 31 because they were having a sitewide 25%-off sale and I didn't know how long it would last, but I'm still counting that as a victory. I ordered four powder eyeshadows, one Jelly Much eyeshadow, and one Lux Lipsti
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My Best No-Buy Tips

Since I'm moving this month and need to limit both my spending and my accumulation of new crap, I've put myself on a replacement-only beauty no-buy until the end of August. It's been pretty easy so far: I've been so consumed with other problems that I haven't had much brain space for makeup. But since there's no telling what temptations I'll face in the second half of the month, I thought I'd write up a list of the techniques and mantras that have helped me through previous no- and low-buys. (Disclaimer: I don't have a shopping addiction, which is a serious disorder, and I'm not qualified to counsel people who do. This advice is designed for those who, like me, occasionally impulse-buy things they can live without.) 1. Know your triggers.  Here are mine: a. Feeling (even) more broke than usual. I've spent my entire adult life as a graduate student and underemployed academic, so money has always been tight. But I've noticed that when it
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Anti-Haul: Mauve/Plum/Purple Eyeshadow Palettes

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Despite the flood of new eyeshadow palettes in the past few years, I own just a few: Modern Renaissance, Naked2 Basics, a nine-pan custom theBalm palette, and a magnetic palette containing, among other things, slightly less than half (five shades) of a depotted theBalm Nude 'Tude. The newest palette in my collection is Modern Renaissance, which I bought in December 2016; the others are all at least three years old. Of course, by normal-person standards, this is a lot  of eyeshadow. But by beauty-blogger standards (which is what we're using here, right? cool), it's almost nothing. No, actually, this is  a lot. There are a few reasons for my (relative) restraint in this category. First, though I wear eyeshadow almost every day, I'm more of a wash-of-one-neutral-color person than a seven-different-shades-plus-liner-and-falsies person. I also prefer cream and liquid formulas to powders, especially in the current heat and humidity. And even if I were someone who made time t
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