Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Today I'm reviewing the second half of my recent ColourPop order: the Super Shock Shadow in Cowboy, a matte lavender, and the Lippie Primer, a clear lip primer that, according to the CP website , "enhances the wear of any lip product and keeps your lips looking and feeling healthy!" After my mixed experience with four Super Shock Shadows back in February, I resolved not to order any more glitter eyeshadows from ColourPop. I do like a little shimmer or a metallic finish, but ColourPop doesn't seem to produce eyeshadows that fall between matte and Ziggy Stardust on the glitter spectrum. So, for my second order, I chose one of the candy-colored matte shadows released this spring. Cowboy (I remain baffled by ColourPop nomenclature) is a very pale lavender that I hoped would be an opaque, matte version of Kiko 251 . Alas, it's not. It's also not a very good eyeshadow in its own right, which is evident even from arm swatches. Left, three passes; right, one pass. Yo...

When ColourPop released a line of 15 highlighters early last month, I didn't take much notice. I'd never used a highlighter before, and since this hot, humid weather gives me a perpetual...let's call it "glow," I didn't think I needed any extra radiance. If anything, I needed the opposite. But curiosity and the usual flood of gushing ColourPop reviews prevailed, and I eventually decided to pick up a couple of highlighters. The highlighters are $8 each, and I decided to order two. Narrowing down the selection was difficult, since some of them differed only minutely from others. I had a few requirements, though. Above all, I wanted to avoid any highlighters with big glitter chunks, which several of the ColourPop highlighters seemed to have. My desired effect was more along these lines... Source ...than these: Source I also shied away from the highlighters that seemed too dark or orange for my skintone and the ones that looked more like pearlescent blushes (thou...

Just call me Virgil . To save some money in the coming school year, I'm moving at the end of the summer into a two-bedroom duplex apartment. As moves go, this one will be almost comically easy, since my new building is next door to my current one. But I'll be sharing the apartment with a friend from my grad-school cohort, and though she's well aware of my makeup-hoarding ways, I can't exactly continue to use my entire living space as as a vanity table. The more stuff I can eliminate this summer, the better, and I'm starting with lipsticks and glosses. I'm hoping this can be a semi-regular series of quickie posts in the two months leading up to the move. I think most of us have a purge-atory: an area where we put beauty products that we never wear but can't bring ourselves to throw away.  There they linger for months or years, victims of our ambivalence. I'm guilty of saving unworn makeup for all the worst reasons: because I wore it to a Janelle Monáe co...

Early this month, just after returning from England, I started my summer job in the university archives. These archives house documents related to the history of the university, over a century's worth of senior theses, and the lifelong correspondence of some prominent alumni. My job for the summer is to reprocess the papers of one such alum, a New York-based lawyer who was involved in the founding of the League of Nations, though he later resigned in disgust at the American government's reluctance to get involved in anything resembling international cooperation. My task is to sit in the basement and reorganize a huge collection of letters written and received between 1917 and 1951. I've spent 15 hours with this collection and am up to the summer of 1922, and I've been working pretty efficiently, so you can imagine how many papers are involved. This might sound like a tedious job, but I've been enjoying it immensely. As most of you know, I specialize in Renaissance l...

Last week I went vegan, with the exception of the occasional splash of milk in my coffee (I'm sorry, non-dairy milk is not the same). I'd been meaning to do this experiment for at least a year, but something always came up. Either I had a lot of cheese in my fridge that I needed to eat before it spoiled, or there was a new cheese-based recipe that I wanted to try, or I started thinking what a shame it would be if I was hit by a bus during my vegan week and died without having tried every kind of cheese available at Whole Foods. I really like cheese, guys. Last month, though, I resolved that my vegan week would start as soon as I returned from the UK. It was perfect timing: there were no dairy products in my apartment and I simply refrained from buying new ones. There were a few reasons why I decided to dabble in veganism. The first was ethical. I've been mostly vegetarian for five years, also for ethical reasons; I eat fish about once a month and meat a few times a year, wh...