Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

1. Spend several days wondering whether 27 is too old to wear a topcoat containing holographic microglitter and large pastel daisy-shaped glitter. Entertain paranoid visions of one of your advisors running into you in the department office, noticing your daisy-covered nails, and immediately losing all respect for you. 2. Decide that 27 is not too old, provided you layer Daisy Field over a neutral color. Choose Essie Marshmallow, which you haven't worn in well over a year. 3. Remember why you haven't worn Marshmallow in well over a year: because it still looks streaky after three coats and it takes forever to dry. %$@#@%#$!!!11! 4. 24 hours later, all three coats of Marshmallow are fully dry. Now for the fun part: adding the daisies. 5. Notice that the daisies are pink, yellow, and white, not pink, yellow, and orange, as you initially thought. This means that the white daisies won't even show up against the Marshmallow backdrop. ^%$&*!!1! How could you have taken so many...

Since joining Instagram two months ago, I've become more aware than ever of the sheer number of beauty blogs out there. It seems like every other woman on Instagram identifies herself in her profile as a beauty blogger. The #bbloggers tag accrues hundreds of new posts per minute (granted, some of these are spammers misusing the tag to draw attention to themselves, but hey). I used to worry that blogging was a dying art, but now I'm not so sure. What I am fairly sure of, though, is that many people are getting into blogging for the wrong reasons, or going about it in a misguided way. They need some advice. Do they need my advice, specifically? Maybe not, but I'm going to offer it anyway, because that's the sort of person I am. I've held off from making this post for fear of coming off as a pompous windbag, but given that I'm training to be a full-time pompous windbag (i.e. academic), why should I hesitate? So, without further ado, some dos and don'ts of bea...

I'm an ocean away from the product I'm about to describe, writing through a haze of jet lag. Let's see how this post turns out. For the longest time, I avoided any hint of orange in my face makeup. My desire for knowledge of colors and undertones turned into a harmful strictness, and I assumed that because I was relatively cool-toned, I should wear warm colors sparingly. I kept buying vivid blue-red lipsticks, ignoring my suspicion that they looked a bit off against my complexion. They were cool-toned and I was cool-toned, so they must be my most flattering colors, right? Right. In the same spirit, I wore my warmest blush, Sleek Life's a Peach, only occasionally until this spring. One day, on a whim, I applied a little more Life's a Peach than usual before putting on Urban Decay Streak , and I was shocked at how the milky peach blush and lipstick lit up my complexion. Part of the reason was no doubt that I'd finally put on an appropriate amount of blush instead ...

In the last couple of weeks, I've been a bad early modernist: I've watched the BBC miniseries of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall without first reading the books. I did start reading Wolf Hall two years ago, but I just couldn't get into it, despite my childhood obsession with Tudor history. There's something about grad school that makes one averse to novels set in the time period one studies. (My own research interests lie in Stuart, not Tudor, England, but the early 16th century is close enough.) However, I didn't have any trouble getting absorbed in the BBC version, not least because of its aesthetic richness. The indoor scenes are filmed in deep shadow to evoke an era before electricity. The costumes and hairstyles make me feel like I'm watching Holbein portraits come to life (indeed, Holbein makes a cameo in the fourth episode). And while the makeup is historically accurate, i.e. barely there, I can still find beauty inspiration in the colors that the charact...

Many thanks to everyone who gave me Canadian beauty advice! As it turned out, I bought three beauty items in Toronto, none of them from a Canadian company: an American Apparel nail polish, a Face Shop sheet mask, and an Inglot custom eyeshadow duo. I almost never wear glitter topcoats, but I made a (possibly unwise) exception for AA's Daisy Field. I'm glad I live in a world where one can wear blossom-shaped glitter on one's nails. I'm very pleased with the Inglot duo, which comprises a pale gold and a dark greenish gold (it looks olive here, but it's much yellower on the eyes). Expect a review soon! Those of you who commented on my last post seemed to agree that there's not much difference between Canadian and American beauty offerings, except that Americans have it easier price-wise. By and large, I found this to be true. There's far more overlap between CVS and Shoppers Drug Mart than there is between, say, CVS and Superdrug or Boots. I did hope to track d...