Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

I came early to my calling (pedantry). In that spirit, I'm joining with another doctoral student, Sylirael of The Painted Rogue , for a collaboration post on makeup in graduate school! (Or, I suppose, a pair of collaboration posts: this is mine, and you can find hers here .) Despite our disciplinary divide--I'm in the humanities, she's in the sciences--we both have a lot of thoughts on the experience of being a makeup-wearing female academic. I wear makeup; I can also read. Fancy that! "I am not sure I can give you the remotest idea of what graduate school is like," wrote Tom Wolfe in 1972. "Nobody ever has. Millions of Americans now go to graduate schools, but just say the phrase--'graduate school'--and what picture leaps into the brain? No picture, not even a blur. Half the people I knew in graduate school were going to write a novel about it. I thought about it myself. No one ever wrote such a book, as far as I know. Everyone used to sniff th...

1. A Confession I wrote the first draft of this post last night, under the influence of two of these: Gin, cucumber Dry Soda (which you must try, if you have access to it), and enough fruit/veg garnish that I could pretend, at least for a few seconds, that it was a week from today and I was drinking a Pimm's Cup across the Atlantic. After a few gin-infused strawberries, I seem more charming to myself than I actually am, and my writing tends to suffer accordingly. Lucky for you that I didn't write too much, and that I edited the post this morning, under the less giddy-making influence of a large coffee. 2. A 花見 (Flower-Viewing) This week saw the last meeting of my monthly dissertation seminar in Washington, DC. On my lunch break, I walked around Capitol Hill and took photos of nineteenth-century brickwork and cotton-candy-colored lilacs: And white pom-pom flowers (scientific term, of course): I arrived in Washington a couple of weeks too late for peak cherry-blossom ...

Name: Maybelline Color Statement Lipstick in Ruby Star Date Purchased: February 2013 Grade: B Notes: Ruby Star was a gift from my mom, who included it in her annual Valentine's package (aww). She thought she was sending me an unremarkable berry-red lipstick, not a berry-red lipstick with a raging case of disco fever. How wrong she was. Ruby Star's distinguishing feature is an obscene abundance of gold and blue glitter. As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I'm averse to shimmer and glitter in lipsticks, so I would never have bought this for myself. But the universe placed it in my path, and as it turns out, disco fever is highly contagious. Had I glanced at Ruby Star under drugstore lighting, I would have muttered the F-word--frost--and moved on. But having seen it in direct sunlight, I'm reluctant to call it a frost lipstick; I think of frost as white or silver, with smaller, finer particles. Though Ruby Star's base color is cool-toned, the gold glitter warms ...

Yeah, you try coming up with a synonym for "nail polish" that begins with "S." Also, please note that this post contains way too many photos. After an especially brutal winter, spring toyed with us for weeks and weeks before settling in. Throughout March and early April, we suffered through alternating two-day periods of "hmm, maybe I can put away my wool coat until next winter" and "LOL NOPE." Last week the temperature dipped below freezing again, and some areas even got snow. So I'm a little reluctant to write a post with "spring" in the title; I don't want to jinx what looks like the official, irreversible, no-really-this-time end of winter. But today's perfect weather has me feeling optimistic, so let's talk about corals and pastels and glitter topcoats. In ROYGBIV order (more properly ROGBVV, plus two misc.): Left to right: Chanel Tapage, Essie Resort Fling, Milani Showy Sea-Green, Essie In the Cab-ana, Essie Pla...

(Three questions of balance, actually.) In my review of NARS Lhasa , I mentioned that I have several under-the-radar beauty staples, products I use so often I've stopped thinking about them. I thought I'd follow up on that post with a review of another product I use almost every day: NARS blush in Mata Hari, a cool-toned dusty pink with faint plum undertones. Mata Hari is not a cult favorite like Orgasm; in fact, one of my favorite beauty bloggers has dubbed it an "Unsung Hero." How fitting that a blush named after a spy should evade the notice of devoted NARS fans.  In shade, as spies prefer. I suspect Mata Hari has kept such a low profile because it's neither a fluorescent statement blush like Exhibit A nor a neutral blush like Douceur. Thinking about these two color categories makes me want to break out my long-dormant Japanese: Mata Hari walks the line between 地味 and 派手, between jimi (understated) and hade (showy). It belongs to a liminal category: bright e...