Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

How's that for a convoluted title? Anyway, I'm going to Toronto for the first time at the end of this week! I'll be presenting at a conference and will be in the city for a mere 48 hours, so I won't have much time for sightseeing (though I have a couple of meals planned with friends who have ended up there over the years). However, I know I have a few Canadian readers, and I'd love some advice on what to do in Toronto--I'll be staying downtown in the theatre district, but I might have time to go elsewhere. What I'll almost certainly have a chance to do, however, is duck into a drugstore and look at all the Canadian makeup, so let me know if you have any recommendations! I'm planning to check out the Joe Fresh lipsticks, and I've heard good things about Annabelle and Lise Watier makeup as well. Overall, though, I'm pretty ignorant about Canadian brands. Please enlighten me! What is not to be missed? What should I skip entirely? Also, since I usual...

Until recently, teal was one of my least favorite colors. It unsettled me in the same way that fuchsia used to: both are amphibious, ill-defined colors. But one swipe of fuchsia lipstick in the summer of 2011 banished my unease forever, and I've just experienced a similar conversion to teal. It started when I looked at swatch photos of Essie's Spring 2015 collection and found myself drawn to Garden Variety, a bright, blue-leaning teal creme. I almost bought it, but I decided to look for a cruelty-free version instead, despite my usual aversion to dupe-hunting . Serendipity, in the form of Teresa's Instagram , put Sephora Formula X Enigma on my radar, and I bought it during a brief trip to New York last weekend. As a bonus, it matched the dress I was wearing that day: (FYI, though Sephora claims that the Formula X brand is cruelty-free, it does appear to be sold in China. Whether or not that destroys its cruelty-free status depends on your personal stance on the issue.) I ...

(I typed "Spring 2013" at first, then spent a few seconds wondering why that didn't look right.) Not quite five months since my last empties post , I've accumulated another small collection of used-up products: Herewith, some mini-reviews, in no particular order: CoverGirl LashBlast Length Mascara There's a reason why I never write posts about mascara: I find it really boring. I don't understand the obsession that some people have with attaining super-thick or super-long lashes. I like my mascara to look as natural and non-clumpy as possible, and I've been using LashBlast Length ever since Eva Chen recommended it on her tumblr , which must have been three years ago. The formula is on the thin side, and it coats my lashes evenly and doesn't smear or flake. Until I find an affordable cruelty-free mascara that produces the same effect, I'll keep buying this one--and occasionally forgetting to put it on, because I truly could not be less interested in ...

I've been on Instagram for three weeks now, and it's brought me a lot of delight so far. I love posting snippets of my life and getting glimpses into other people's travels, lunches, and lipstick hauls. I also know that not everyone takes the same approach to Instagram that I do. Some people use it primarily to sell a product or promote a business, which is fine by me: I wasn't surprised to discover that Instagram was as commercialized as any other social-media site. What did surprise me, though, was the very hazy line between personal and professional accounts--but no, "professional" isn't the right word. I'm talking about this sort of thing: All right, we can agree that this is probably a bot. But what about the person, or entity, leaving this comment on multiple people's accounts? Surely just another spambot, right? No, actually. Further investigation revealed that the account belonged to a real person who had fallen for someone else's sche...

Just a quick review of the final two items from last month's Ulta order: NYX Slim Lip Pencils in Dolly Pink, a pastel lavender-pink, and Pumpkin, a burnt orange with gold shimmer. I keep protesting on this blog that I don't care much for lip liner, but I also keep buying more lip liners. I need to cut out one of those habits. I also need to figure out what I want lip liners to do for me, because I'm a bit hazy on that point right now. Do I want to increase the longevity of my lipsticks? Create sharper, clearer lines? Experiment with layering colors? Make sheer or patchy lipsticks opaque? Most importantly, do I care about any of these activities enough to spend extra time applying lip liner? Right now, I'm afraid, the answer seems to be no. I did, however, have specific reasons for buying each of these colors. I wanted Dolly Pink as an underlayer for the not-quite-opaque-enough Maybelline Lilac Flush , and Pumpkin looked like a cool color that could be worn on its own. A...

I made my stage debut in 1996 at the age of eight, in my elementary school's production of The Phantom Tollbooth . I had two roles: the Spelling Bee (marred by a wardrobe malfunction: part of my headband fell off and I pouted for the rest of the scene) and the Senses Taker. For the second role, I wore a severe bun, a prim, high-necked brown dress, and a pair of fake glasses, and asked Milo and his companions to tell me "when you were born, where you were born, why you were born, the schools you've attended, the schools you haven't attended..." Years would pass before I understood that the name of my role was a pun on "census taker," and that the adult world didn't actually contain a career path based on taking people's senses, except perhaps anesthesiology. Years would pass, too, before I understood why asking someone which schools they hadn't attended and which people they hadn't met was so funny. In the spirit of the Senses Taker, I tho...

Before starting this post, I spent a long time five minutes trying to come up with a good simile for the operation of material desire online. The Internet engenders small cravings, then quickly magnifies those cravings until you can't imagine a time when you didn't want X nail polish or Y lipstick, even if you first heard about it only three days ago. Could we call it a whirlpool of desire? A long street strewn with bits of grass that gradually form themselves into tumbleweed, and the tumbleweed is your longing for a certain product, and the wind is peer pressure or something, and--never mind. Maybe I should illustrate this process with an example, instead. A few months ago, I read this article and became fixated on the lavender-pink nail polish in image 5, which turned out to be Chanel Sweet Lilac. This made me aware that I didn't own a light pink polish; the last one I'd bought was Essie French Affair in spring 2011, and that had long since turned gooey and gone to...