Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Name: Maybelline Color Sensational Lipstick in Nude Lust Date of Purchase: Jan. 25, 2014 Grade: A- Notes: In the first part of Don Quixote (she began, like a totally normal beauty blogger), Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza meet a group of prisoners sentenced to hard labor. The galley slaves are chained together, which arouses Don Quixote’s sense of injustice. He asks the men about themselves; the most brazen of them, Gin é s de Pasamonte, boasts that he is writing a thrilling autobiography that will surpass every picaresque novel ever published, and that he welcomes his ten-year prison sentence because it will give him a chance to finish his book. Don Quixote asks if the memoir is finished yet. “‘How can it be finished,’ answered Gin é s, ‘when my life isn’t finished yet?’” I find myself in much the same position as Gin é s de Pasamonte. I started my lipstick chronology with the intention of not buying any more lipsticks until I had taken a complete inventory of the...

Name: L'Oreal Colour Riche Lipstick in Fairest Nude Date of Purchase: Summer 2012 Grade: B Notes: A white lady complaining about the dearth of cool-toned nude lipsticks will not, and definitely should not, get much pity. Nonetheless: why are there so few cool-toned nude lipsticks pale enough for me? I'm not even the coolest of cool-toned pale people, yet almost all the nude lipsticks I've tried have pulled too peachy-warm. I've found one exception so far: L'Oreal's Fairest Nude, a gift from my mother, who has been loyal to L'Oreal lipstick since I can remember. It's the perfect color for me: definitely nude instead of MLBB, but with cool mauve undertones. Here it is in all its cheap '80s-tastic glory, next to my other L'Oreal lipstick, True Red: The cool-toned skin of my inner arm makes Fairest Nude look warmer and browner by comparison: But on my face, it's the perfect nude: slightly darker than my skintone, but light and opaque enough to ...

Name: MAC Amplified Creme Lipstick in Up the Amp Date of Purchase: April 2012 Grade: A- Notes: Lots of purple lip colors on the blog recently! Up the Amp was my very first, inspired by tumblr bloggers like Arabelle Sicardi of Powder Doom. In that post, Arabelle is wearing OCC's lip tar in Belladonna, but I decided to edge into the world of purple lipstick with a pinker purple. Then OCC discontinued Belladonna and I never got to try it at all! The lesson here is, don't edge into color. Just wear it. There are many more purple lip colors now than there were in early 2012. The only ones on my radar back then were Belladonna, Illamasqua Kontrol (too blue-gray and gothy for me), and MAC Up the Amp, a cool-toned pinky purple with a bit of gray mixed in:   I ordered Up the Amp sight unseen, and was pleased with what I got, though I'd wanted something a little less muted. Up the Amp wasn't my Platonic purple lipstick, but it was close. That winter, I brought Up the Amp with m...

I've been carrying my tube of Maybelline Vision in Violet all over the Eastern seaboard this weekend, reminding myself repeatedly to return it to CVS. I'm a poor grad student; a $9.50 lipgloss, especially one that I won't wear often, is hard to justify to myself. And yet. It's an opaque blue-toned purple lipgloss! A true purple lip color of any kind is hard enough to find, let alone a lipgloss, let alone from a drugstore brand. So what if it makes me look like a pallid deep-sea creature whom David Attenborough catches gnawing on a whale carcass? And so my stash grows and my checking account dwindles. I've been at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, for the past couple of days, looking at things like this: Just a perfectly preserved first edition of John Donne's Anniversaries from 1612, nbd. Seventeenth-century readers often took it upon themselves to correct errors in the text--here we have "weaving" written in faded red ink (and exqui...

Here's the thing about the Maybelline Color Elixir in Vision in Violet: Maybelline never promised that the vision would be a good one. I was at CVS today, buying a new tube of my favorite liquid eyeliner, Maybelline Line Stiletto in Blackest Black, and I decided I'd take advantage of the Maybelline sale and try one of the new Color Elixirs. I'd heard encouraging things about these glosses, not least that the line contained that elusive unicorn of drugstore cosmetics, a true purple gloss that remained purple on the lips. And the tubes, designed to resemble lipsticks suspended upside down in clear jelly, fit into one of my favorite aesthetic categories: things that look like other things. So Vision in Violet accompanied me home, where I discovered that it matched my beloved purple Converse: In the tube, it looked like a pink-tinged purple; swatched, however, it pulled much more blue. This was very exciting for a purple-lip lover who had been burned by deceptively purple-looki...

Name: NARS Sheer Lipstick in Flamenco Date of Purchase: Feb. 2012 Grade: A Notes: NARS was the first beauty brand I fell in love with, and it remains my favorite to this day. (That said, my experience is limited; with the exception of two YSL lip products and two Chanel nail polishes, I haven’t made a foray into truly high-end brands, and let’s hope it stays that way for now.) NARS strikes me as a smaller, more subdued, and slightly more expensive version of MAC. Each brand offers a good blend of hardworking neutrals and crazy neons at a mid-range price point, but whereas MAC releases multiple huge collections per season, NARS’ seasonal collections are less overwhelmingly frequent and more carefully curated. I don’t own a huge number of NARS products, but I’ve been very impressed by almost all the ones I’ve tried. Which brings me to my first NARS purchase: the sheer rose-red Flamenco. When I say I have dry lips, I mean that it’s a good day when they’re not bleeding. I’ve trie...

Name: Laura Mercier Sheer Lipstick in Bare Lips Date of Purchase: Late 2011 Grade: B+ Notes: Bare Lips was my first high-end beauty purchase, and my first purchase—though, sadly for my grad-student wallet, not my last—from the Bluemercury a few blocks from campus. Unfortunately for poor Bare Lips, it’s become linked in my mind with my trip to Seattle in January 2012, which would have been nothing more than a lovely reunion with old friends if my suitcase, containing almost all the clothes I owned, hadn’t disappeared somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle. “We’ve had a lot of thefts from the baggage carousel recently,” said the nonchalant airport employee. I cried almost constantly for the next few days, until my suitcase turned up at the Seattle airport, having been mislabeled in San Francisco and put on the wrong airline. So all ended well, but I’ll always associate the strong cotton-candy scent of Bare Lips with that ordeal. Sorry, BL. Not your fault. But look how mu...

I’ve been accused of owning a lot of nail polish. Those built-in shelves are the best part of my apartment. (The mice are the worst.) We often hear about the dangers of impulse buys and the benefits of looking at swatches and reviews before committing to a fancy bottle of nail polish. But the polishes I wear most frequently tend to be the ones I bought on a whim, or the ones that came into my life unexpectedly. When I’m reading online reviews, my eye is always drawn to the chunky glitters in jelly bases, the flashy duochrome shimmers; I can spend hours looking at swatches of those. But I’ve learned that I don’t really like wearing them. See all the glitters on the top shelf? I can’t remember the last time I reached for one of them. The ones I wear most often are deep, saturated colors in creme finishes, like Essie Stylenomics. Stylenomics is from the fall 2012 collection of the same name, but I believe it's been added to Essie's permanent line, because my mother found...

Name: MAC Lustre Lipstick in Capricious Date of Purchase: August 2011 Grade: B Notes: Capricious was my very first non-drugstore lipstick, purchased from the MAC counter at the Nordstrom near my old high school in San Francisco. (How’s that for a panoply of prepositional phrases?) Capricious has a lustre finish, which means that it’s glossy and sheer and, at least for me, somewhat drying—I think the culprit is the shimmer lurking in the formula. Despite this, I wore Capricious almost every day that fall. It’s a reddish plumberry color that will make you look nice, if you’re into that. A fairly heavy swatch--you can see how sheer the Lustres are. If this were a different color, it would look uneven on my lips, but it's so close to my natural lip color that it blends in seamlessly. Wait, that color looks familiar. A dupe, a palpable dupe! The differences between Capricious (right) and Revlon Mauvy Night lie in formula and saturation, not in color. Mauvy Night is more opaque a...

I’ve been waffling for weeks over whether to buy NARS Kauai, a new eyeshadow duo for Spring 2014. Because of my devotion to intense lip colors, I’m very much a neutral-eye person, but the pale gold and deep purple of Kauai are beckoning me out of my comfort zone. The formula is smooth and buttery and perfect, and the finish transforms from a subtle sheen under natural light (above) to sparklemania in artificial light. But it’s $35! I don’t know! I also don’t know for sure whether it’s limited edition: Temptalia says it’s not, which is reassuring, but other bloggers say it is. Ugh, decisions. Stray notes: 1) I really need to stop swatching over that cluster of freckles on my right hand; 2) the apparent unevenness of the purple is due to said hasty swatching, not to a fault in the formula.

Name: Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Cherries in the Snow Date of Purchase: August 2011 Grade: A Notes: It’s snowing! I didn’t plan for this post to intersect with Winter Storm Janus, but isn’t it nice how that worked out? (Addendum, a month after writing the post: If I'd reposted it on blogspot yesterday, or two days before yesterday, or a week ago, I could have said the same thing. God, this winter.) Premiered in 1953, Cherries in the Snow is one of the oldest lip colors on the market. Here’s the original ad, equal parts patronizing and surreal: Who knows there was a morning when your orange juice sparkled like champagne? There’s a certain thrill to wearing a 61-year-old lip color. It’s a firsthand link to the past, more tangible, immediate, and beautifully mundane than a book or a work of art. There’s also a matching nail polish, which my 89-year-old grandmother and I both happen to own: Cherries in the Snow is usually described as red, but I see it as a deep, pigmented...

Name: Revlon Colorburst Lipstick in Soft Nude Date of Purchase: September 2011 Grade: B+ Notes: This was one of many Tumblr-induced lipstick purchases at the CVS across from campus. That summer, I’d kept coming across images like this one , from Creatures of the Wind Spring/Summer 2012: Now, if I asked you how you’d replicate this look (created by James Boehmer for NARS), you’d probably mention the model’s eye makeup first, not her lipstick. You’d say something intelligent about how the nude lipstick mutes her lip color so her gorgeous pastel eyeliner and gleaming cheekbones stand out. None of this occurred to me when I first saw the image. Instead, I decided that all I needed to imitate it was a nude lipstick. I chose a stark beige nude with no pink undertones. Oh, and I didn’t own any other makeup. Because I am a kind, giving person, I’ve reproduced the result for you. To quote the best vanity license plate I’ve ever seen: YEAH…NO. That said, this is not the worst nude lips...

If you happen to run into Adorned, a limited-edition lipgloss from Revlon’s holiday collection, please treat yourself. I’m very much not a gloss person, but this stuff is as pigmented and long-lasting as a liquid lipstick. It’s a stunning fuchsia color with matching shimmer, and I think it’s worth owning just to look at: I know.