Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

What were the odds that I'd review two lipsticks named "Crush" in three days? Pretty good, actually, since drugstore beauty brands love to name their lip products "Crush." There doesn't seem to be any color theme linking them together, either. Milani's Amore Matte Lip Creme in Crush is dark brown; Maybelline's Coral Crush lipstick is, well, coral; Rimmel's Crush lipstick is a peachy nude; and my most recent beauty purchase, Revlon's ColorBurst Balm Stain in Crush, is a vivid magenta plum. I swear each brand has a hat full of names evoking positive and vaguely romantic/sexual emotions —"crush," "flirt," "kiss," "embrace," "tease" —and a bored-to-hell intern assigns each new product one of those names at random, then goes back to posting on Kik or whatever the kiddos use in 2015. We're a long way from NARS' Goodbye Emmanuelle lipstick . Whatever induced me to buy this particular Crush l...

If you distilled all of 2015's lip-color trends into a single product, you'd come up with Milani Amore Matte Lip Creme in Crush. Crush ticks all the boxes: it's a dark brown (check) liquid lipstick (check) that dries to a flat matte finish (check). Interestingly, it's also a marriage of high-end and low-end trends. Matte liquid lipsticks have been everywhere in the last couple of years, but the brands popularizing them have been largely indie or drugstore brands: NYX, Lime Crime, ColourPop, Kat Von D, Jeffree Star, LA Splash, and now Milani. Kat Von D is the obvious outlier in that list — her Everlasting Liquid Lipsticks go for $19 at Sephora — but as befits a former tattoo artist, she pays more attention to street style and Instagram than to runways. The trend is trickling upward, though: MAC is releasing its own line of Retro Matte Liquid Lipsticks this fall, and who knows what other brands will launch their boats on the liquid matte river? I'm not sure how I feel...

My love for k-pop is no secret. And as luck would have it — good or bad luck, you decide — I started this blog mere weeks before I fell down the k-pop rabbit hole. Many of us can blame Kate of Drivel about Frivol for one obsession or another; for me, that obsession was k-pop, which I'd never encountered before reading her post about Spica's retro-fabulous "You Don't Love Me" music video . For a beauty junkie like me, k-pop was a wonderland. Spica's makeup was so thoughtfully designed and immaculately executed that I imagined they must be one of the most successful groups in the industry. But as I soon discovered, Spica has been trying to break into the mainstream for several years and is best known for being "underrated." The visual aspect of k-pop is so important that even a group as cash-strapped as Spica will hire a nationally famous makeup artist to design their '60s-inspired cat-eye liner. The music videos from richer entertainment co...