Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

In the last few years, I've noticed two different beauty ideals emerging on the Internet, or at least in the corners of the Internet that I frequent. The first is "effortless beauty": glowing skin, almost no color makeup, and an overall air of having something better to do. The second is what we might call "Instagram beauty": the heavily contoured, shaded, and blended look exemplified by the Kardashians and their followers. It's odd to see the beauty world so polarized, and I've been wondering how these two very different aesthetics developed. When I think of "effortless beauty," I think of Into the Gloss , a blog I've followed for about three years now. In ITG's most beloved feature, The Top Shelf , staff members interview celebrities, models, creative types, and otherwise unremarkable rich kids about their beauty routines. Product junkies like Lindsay Lohan and Dita Von Teese show up occasionally, but if you scrolled through the To...

But first, how my local CVS crushed my lipstick-collecting dreams for the 837th time. But first , how I ended up at the CVS, a place I do my best to avoid, for the 837th time. I was lying in bed a few nights ago, lamenting the state of my skin, when it hit me that I'd had my current tube of concealer for almost two years. Suddenly it all made sense. How could my complexion clear up if I kept applying two-year-old concealer to my blemishes? I also realized that I couldn't remember when I'd bought my tube of mascara. July? August? Maybe that explained why it had stopped working. The next day, when I popped into CVS to replace my concealer and mascara, I noticed that they were having a 2-for-3 deal on almost all makeup. Perfect! A chance to get Revlon Matte Balm in Unapologetic, a neon coral I'd been vacillating over for almost a year. But the two tubes of Unapologetic in stock had been opened and smeared on someone's hand, and the same turned out to be true of the two...

It occurs to me that "Feels Like Negative Thirteen" would have been a great name for an early-'00s pop-punk emo band. What it is not, however, is a phrase I want to read on weather.com just before I walk to the library in the morning. Anyway, this is a quick addendum to yesterday's review of four ColourPop eyeshadows. Today I used Bill, the lone matte shade I ordered, so I wanted to give you a sense of how it performed. Bill looks like a midtone pinkish brown in the pan... This photo also gives a good idea of the texture. ...but on my eyelids, it softens into a pale dusty pink with a hint of lilac and almost no brown. Neutral yet distinctive, and very soft and pretty. Who would have guessed that Bill would turn into that color when worn? So strange. I'm not complaining, though, since this is the color I hoped for when I ordered Bill, and I was disappointed to see that murky brown when I opened the pot. It took me a long time to get interested in matte eyeshadows,...

I'm back with my second round of ColourPop reviews! ( Here's my review of CP's Lippie Stix and Lippie Pencil in Frenchie.) This review would have gone up earlier, but my parcel was delayed due to last week's bad weather, and it was only today that I got to try on the four eyeshadows I ordered almost two weeks ago. Clockwise from top left: Bill , Bae , Sequin , and Krinkle . In my previous ColourPop review, I discussed my thoughts on ColourPop's aggressively ~edgy~ branding and Urban Dictionary-inspired product names, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice to say that the more time I spend on ColourPop's website, the more convinced I become that I'm not their target audience. That doesn't preclude my enjoying my makeup, though, so let's see how these eyeshadows perform! Unboxed, same order as above: Each Super Shock eyeshadow ($5 each) is housed in a screw-top pot with a transparent lid. The containers are taller than my other eyeshadow singles, ...

The past week has been unusually busy, so I haven't had a chance to take photos and write paragraphs and all that. But I've had a series of fugitive beauty-related thoughts, none of them quite substantial enough for an entire post, and I thought I'd compile them here before the wind blew them away. 1. My boyfriend is visiting for the week, and we had an early Valentine's Day tapas outing on February 13 and spent V-Day itself on such thrilling tasks as walking to the grocery store in the snow... ...and making vegetarian chili from this recipe (plus 1.5 tablespoons of cocoa powder, and minus the celery because who puts celery in chili ). I marveled at the alien symmetry of the innards of a bell pepper: 2. My Valentine's Day nail polish was Zoya Gilda, a fuchsia microshimmer that gives an almost foiled effect on the nails. Unfortunately, Gilda is something of a problem polish: it takes a long time to dry completely, it starts chipping within a day or two, and it...

If you've had Internet access in the past year, you've almost certainly heard of ColourPop , a small online-only brand with a formidable range of lipsticks, lip liners, and cream-to-powder eyeshadows, each a mere $5. Launched just last year, the brand has risen to prominence almost overnight, largely through partnering with popular bloggers and YouTube gurus. I first heard of ColourPop last fall, when Temptalia began reviewing their eyeshadows and lipsticks, and my curiosity grew as more and more bloggers raved about the products (which, as a bonus, are cruelty-free and made in LA). When I mentioned wanting to try Frenchie, a lipstick described by ColourPop as "[b]right warm neon red in a matte finish," Renee of Bad Outfit, Great Lipstick very kindly offered to send it to me. She'd ordered both the lip pencil and the lipstick (every ColourPop Lippie Stix [shudder] has a matching pencil), but hadn't loved the color. You can see her review of Frenchie and four...