Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

In the last year, I've become obsessed with an aesthetic that I like to call "Edwardian cyborg": futuristic sleekness coupled with windswept Gibson-girl glamour. This is the image that started it all:   You've already seen this photo in an earlier post , wherein I experimented with theBalm's Nude 'tude palette. "Edwardian cyborg" was the name I gave to my (much inferior) interpretation of this look: glassy lips, touches of frost and metal on the eyes, unnaturally rosy cheeks, hair elaborately piled and carefully mussed. Makeup artist Troy Jensen based this look on the '80s-meets-'40s glamour of the cyborg Rachael from Blade Runner (1982), but I see a few differences between the original and Jensen's rendition. (For my previous post, I traced the image to Jensen's website , but I can't find it there now. Apologies.) Compared to Jensen's cotton-candy cyborg, Rachael, played by notorious Hollywood nutcase Sean Young, has a sm...

I've been particularly short on funds this month, hence the plethora of tl;dr meditative posts and the absence of product reviews. Luckily, I just received my latest stipend check, so I'm planning to do a bit of damage during the High Holy Days of consumerism. (Only online: I can't stand the crush of people at brick-and-mortar sales.) Here are some of the products I've been coveting for the past month, listed in rough order of desire. 1. Face Stockholm Crème Blush in Paris Image via Anthropologie . Putting together my 17th-century look reminded me that I don't own a warm pink blush. I have most color categories covered--cool medium pink, psychedelic magenta, neutral pink-nude, reddish plum, soft orange, even lavender--but I'd like a pink that's warmer than NARS Mata Hari . I've heard great things about Face Stockholm's cream blushes; I even swatched a few of them back in March, but couldn't decide which one to buy and left empty- if not clean-h...

Name: NYX Round Lipstick in Perfect Date Purchased: August 2013   Grade: B Notes: The blunt self-congratulation of the name "Perfect" makes me want to start a line of self-deprecating lipsticks: "Good Enough." "Decent Pigmentation for the Price." "Let's Be Real, This Is a Half-Assed Knockoff of a MAC Limited Edition Lipstick." A name like "Perfect" begs for either confirmation or deflation, and in this case, I'm afraid I'll have to go with the latter. It's not perfect. But it is, perhaps, good enough. Perfect is the very embodiment of the phrase "work-appropriate": a pinkish mauve-ish MLBB color. I bought it hoping for an opaque version of NARS Dolce Vita, and I do think the two are quite similar color-wise. This photo makes Perfect look slightly warmer than it is, but the swatch below is more color-accurate: Like the other NYX Round Lipsticks I've tried, Perfect has a creamy, heavy, slippery formula. It g...

Toiling in the knowledge mines, one occasionally comes upon some fascinating gems. Or, more prosaically: I typed the phrase "auxiliary beauty" into Early English Books Online to see what would pop up. For those of you who aren't pursuing graduate degrees in early modern literature, EEBO is a database containing almost every work printed in English between 1423 and 1700. Let me impress the coolness of this upon you: you can download facsimiles of entire Renaissance books (provided you or your institution has a subscription). You can also search for words or phrases throughout a given period: I'd originally found the phrase "auxiliary beauty" in a slang dictionary from 1699, but I wanted to see if any other writer had used it. As it turned out, the earliest printed text in which it appeared was John Gauden's A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty. Or Artificiall Hansomeness , from 1656. What was happening in 1656? Quick history lesson: England had been intermit...

I have dry lips. Like, really dry. No matter the weather, no matter the season, there's always a possibility that I'll wake up with my lower lip chapped or cracked or even bleeding. This has been the state of things for as long as I can remember, and I have yet to find a solution more effective than sleeping with thick lip balm, replenishing it as soon as I wake up, and wearing it under almost every lip color. (My favorite lip balm these days is Palmer's Cocoa Butter Formula .) This routine usually ensures that I don't walk around with open wounds on my mouth, but with the recent chill and winds on the East Coast, the situation has become critical. I've had to be choosier about the lipsticks I wear, and since winter brings dry lips to many of us, I thought a post about my favorite lipstick formulas would be timely. Literature scholars love pretending to be scientists or mathematicians, so bear with me while I explain the rubric I worked out after several false start...