Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

It's that time again: time for eating candy corn and pumpkin spice Oreos, wearing dark lipstick and bronze nail polish, and applying for jobs and postdocs. In most industries, jobs come up year-round, but the process is very different in academia. In my field, English literature, universities advertise positions in mid-September, applications are due throughout the fall, and there's a hiring conference in January in a different city every year. Interviews are held in hotel rooms, which is exactly as weird as it sounds. If you 1) get interviews and 2) impress your interviewers (both tall orders in this difficult job market), you have campus visits in January and February, which means preparing a job talk and getting interviewed further by your prospective colleagues. Postdocs are equally (if not more) competitive, and each one generally requires its own set of materials. It's all very stressful and time-consuming, and it means that I can't promise regular blog posts for ...

Earlier this year, I attended a department dinner in honor of a visiting speaker.  One professor decided that the best topic on which to engage the graduate students near him was opera. He held forth about the various operas he'd seen recently in New York, and it turned out that quite a few of my classmates also enjoyed opera. I sat there in unaccustomed silence until the professor turned to me: "Do you go?" "Go?" "To the opera?" There was no polite way to say "I barely have enough money for groceries ," so I spluttered something about an opera I'd seen years ago on a standing-room ticket. He asked me which opera. I couldn't remember the title. I wanted to disappear. Ironically, I grew up surrounded by classical music. My father was a classical guitarist who performed almost every day in the Harvard Square subway station for close to a decade. If you passed through that station between 1986 and 1995, there's a good chance you saw...

NYX expanded its matte lipstick line at the beginning of this year, adding some trendier colors to its extensive but mundane collection of reds, pinks, and nudes. The new shade that immediately caught my eye was Up the Bass, a medium purple with a large dose of gray. Because we were heading into spring at that point, I decided to wait and see if I still wanted it in the fall. It turned out that I did (of course I did: it's a purple lipstick), so I picked it up at Ulta last week. Like other '90s lip colors, this shade of grayish lavender is having a moment right now. I believe its first 2010s iteration was the NARS Audacious lipstick in Dominique, but other brands have since produced variations on the theme. True gray lipsticks are also becoming more popular (MAC Halsey comes to mind), and as someone with cool grayish undertones, I couldn't be happier. Up the Bass is poised exactly midway between gray and purple, making it a flattering color for me, but I have a feeling that...

...oh, and two eyeshadows, but who cares about those? I took a lipstick inventory six months ago and got rid of six products. But that didn't come close to eliminating all the lip colors I no longer wore, and I returned from my travels last month with a clearer sense of what I could trust myself to wear and what I could live without. Today being Labor Day, I put aside my academic work to clean the house, including my makeup shelf. For some reason, I found destashing much easier than I had in March, and I ended up with a pile of 15 lipsticks and glosses to toss or give away: The warmer colors: L-R: Topshop Wink, Revlon Mischievous, NYX Peach Cobbler, Rimmel Across the Universe, NARS Flamenco, NARS Last Tango, NARS Rikugien, Maybelline Nude Lust. Swatches, same order: L-R: Wink, Mischievous, Peach Cobbler, Across the Universe, Flamenco, Last Tango, Rikugien, Nude Lust. And the cooler colors:   L-R: Topshop Plastique, Revlon Raspberry Pie, Maybelline Lilac Flush, NYX Raspberry Tart, ...

A lot of stuff here! Let's get into it: New Makeup/Polish: Marc Jacobs Le Marc Lip Creme in Rei of Light: $30 Studded X mini duo (Kat Von D Studded Kiss + Formula X) in Mercy: $7.50 NYX Velvet Matte Lipstick in Midnight Muse: gift from my mom NYX Jumbo Pencil in Black Bean: ditto Total: $37.50 Rei of Light was my big-ticket planned purchase for this month. Having worn it a few times, I'm not sure it's my Platonic rusty orange, as it pulls darker and redder than I thought it would. But I really like it and think I'll wear it a lot this fall, so no harm done. By contrast, the Kat Von D/Formula X duo was a total impulse purchase. After I finished rewriting my third dissertation chapter, I slipped back into the habit of checking all my procrastination sites, including Temptalia. Christine posted about the Sephora end-of-summer sale, and I just couldn't resist the Mercy duo. I wish every lipstick came in a mini version: I don't need a full-sized metallic berry lipst...