Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

I just did some day drinking with a friend to celebrate our last day of teaching this semester, so it's fair to say that I won't be getting any work done this evening. But a single dark & stormy (yes, I'm a lightweight) hardly prevents me from blogging. I've done a lot of product reviews recently, so I thought I'd break up the monotony with a tag I found on the blog Chic Dabbling . Some beauty tags have weirdly farfetched questions ("what would you do if you woke up in the middle of the night and a thief was making off with your nail polish collection?"), but this one is refreshingly straightforward! Warning: it's a long questionnaire and I'm as wordy as ever. You might need your own dark & stormy to make it through this post. 1. Do you remember your first makeup item? I'm not entirely sure which makeup item was my very first, but it may have been the clear Revlon Moon Drops lipstick my grandma bought me when I was 12 or 13. It came in ...

Yellow is an underrepresented color in most people's makeup collections, including mine. Deservedly or not, it has a dismal reputation: The Googlers have spoken: yellow is the most "visible" and "noticeable" color, but like many highly visible and noticeable things, including the Kardashian-Jenner clan, Lime Crime, and Donald Trump, it is also perceived as "annoying" and "depressing." (Actually, the most visible color to the human eye is yellow-green, due to its location in the middle of the color spectrum, but let's not be too picky.) Yellow is notorious for being unflattering to most complexions, and it's the rare eyeshadow palette that includes even an understated mustard, let alone a chartreuse or daffodil. So imagine my surprise when I started noticing yellow nail polish in what seemed like every other k-pop girl-group video released this spring. Here's some proof, arranged chronologically by release date: Mamamoo, "You...

It's been so long since my last post! I've just been too busy to blog, despite having a pile of things to review and the desire to review those things. It's really a terrible feeling. The science-fiction class for which I'm a TA had two paper deadlines in two weeks (don't ask me why), so I was doing what felt like nothing but grading for what felt like forever. But now that my grading is done and classes are almost over, you can expect more frequent posting in the weeks to come! First on my to-review list is a product I'm very excited about: Glossier Boy Brow in Brown. I haven't written much about my eyebrows on this blog, because I don't like doing much to them. I'm very grateful to my past self for not overplucking my naturally thick, dark brows, as so many girls and women did when thinner brows were popular. I'm young enough to have missed the heyday of sperm brows, but their baleful influence lingered for years. When I was a teenager and yo...

The NYX Liquid Suede lipsticks didn't spark my interest when they first came out last year. So many NYX products have disappointed me that I tend to approach the brand with skepticism, and the Liquid Suede line seemed like a hasty attempt to capitalize on the liquid-matte trend of 2015. And since NYX had been making matte liquid lipsticks for years (the Soft Matte Lip Creams, which I'd never bothered trying), it was unclear what niche NYX wanted the Liquid Suedes to fill. The NYX website touted their "soft matte finish," but blog reviews described them as not quite matte, and indeed their full name was "Liquid Suede Cream Lipstick." The shade range was small and divided awkwardly between brownish neutrals and weird NSFW shades like greenish gray and fluorescent lavender. And shortly after the Liquid Suedes were released, NYX followed up with a zillion new shades of matte lipsticks and Soft Matte Lip Creams, plus a "Lip Lingerie" line composed enti...

I went to Boston for a Renaissance-studies conference on Wednesday and just got home last night, so my monthly roundup post is a bit late. I was born in Boston and lived there until I was almost eight, and I've returned periodically since then, but the city still feels foreign —the more foreign for being slightly familiar, I think. (One familiar thing: insanely high winds. I had to stop walking at one point for fear of being blown over.) Most of my time in Boston was taken up with attending academic papers, delivering my own paper on a 17th-century antiquarian treatise, and navigating an awkward Q&A session (you haven't been mansplained to until you've been mansplained to by an elderly Italian art historian). I also created and promptly began neglecting a professional Twitter account. L ivetweeting academic conference panels has become very much a thing in the last year or two, but my brain is incapable of listening and tweeting at the same time, so I'm afraid I won...