Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

I was eight for most of 1996, but I remember that year quite well. In fact, I remember it as an especially good year in my young life. My parents and I had moved to San Francisco the year before, back when an assistant teacher and a busker at Ghirardelli Square could afford a nice two-bedroom in Cole Valley. The Summer Olympics took place in Atlanta, and my best friend Dana and I played with her new gymnast Barbie (complete with parallel bars). I owned a fuchsia velour T-shirt embossed with daisies. My parents drove a 1983 Toyota Corolla. My mom and I laughed at the mysterious "www." and ".com" appearing on billboards and bus ads all over the city. On the evening of the presidential election, my dad picked me up from ballet and I said "Clinton won, didn't he?" and my dad, very pleased, said yes. And the upstart beauty brand Urban Decay launched its first collection: nine lipsticks and a dozen nail polishes in bizarre metallic colors with names like Smo...

Drugstore makeup has become a lot more interesting over the past few years, and I can't help but envy people who are just getting into makeup now and have access to so many weird lipsticks at affordable price points. I've always been drawn to slightly eccentric makeup, but in my early twenties it was impossible to find so much as a true purple lipstick at the drugstore, let alone the blues, blacks, and greiges that are available now. In fact, there were so few purply lipsticks on the shelves of my local CVS back in 2011 that I can remember the exact shades that were  available. There was Revlon Va Va Violet, which leaned more burgundy than purple and looked depressingly streaky in the photos I saw online. There was Revlon Berry Haute, a sort of purplish mauve. There was CoverGirl Divine, a bright magenta that looked purple if you compared it to a true pink. And that was it. The first real live purple lipstick I ever found at the drugstore was Maybelline Brazen Berry, part of th...

Yesterday I came across a very insightful post on r/MakeupRehab, titled "A thought on the fakeness of Instagram..." It's a long post, so I won't quote it in full, but the writer argues that successful Instagrammers like her sister, women whose posts feature them "in trendy places in even trendier outfits," perpetuate an internalized misogyny that filters down to the social-media accounts of ordinary women: It's so absolutely drilled in our heads that we have to be PERFECT at all times. On social media, we never post when we get dumped. We never show ourselves when we splurge on makeup because we had a bad day. We never show when we fail that exam, or have a fight with our partners, or are so depressed we can't leave bed. We never show ourselves eating that third bag of cheetos on the couch. We never show when we fail. And we never show ourselves listening to our favorite songs or holding our loved ones or laughing with a friend and feeling something...

SPRING BREAK WOOOO ...oh, right. The weather may suggest otherwise, but I'm now on spring break. That doesn't mean very much in ABD world, since I should technically spend every waking hour chipping away at my dissertation, but I'm still planning to use my extra free time (or the illusion thereof) to write some reviews I've been putting off. While looking over my lipstick inventory the other day, I realized that I have yet to review ten  of the lipsticks and glosses I've acquired in the past year. I'm not sure how many reviews I'll be able to write in the next week, but I'd like to knock out at least a few so that I can move on to more creative posts. Longtime readers of my blog will remember that in its early days, I had a series called "Lipstick Chronology," in which I reviewed all the lipsticks I owned in chronological order of purchase. Now that I have a substantial backlog of unreviewed lipsticks, I think it's time I made another chro...

I can't remember getting as excited over any Glossier release as I did over the Cloud Paint cream blushes, which launched a week and a half ago (following a "soft launch" at the Oscars, because of course). Two days before the blushes dropped, I had a dream that I was looking at them in a store, but they were in pans instead of tubes, and there were only two shades: a warm brown and a bright red-orange similar to NARS Exhibit A. Say what you will about Glossier, their marketing is capable of infiltrating my subconscious to the point that I have dreams about specific products. Glossier is really good at creating narratives around their merchandise, and as someone who picks apart narratives for a living, I have to respect that. The Cloud Paints are $18 each (though Glossier currently has a two-for-$30 deal), and they come in four colors: Beam, a peach; Dusk, a beige-brown similar to Illamasqua Zygomatic; Haze, a purple berry; and Puff, which I thought  would be a lavender p...

For at least two years now, I've been searching for the perfect cool-toned pale pink blush, something that will give me that fresh-faced but slightly artificial k-beauty look. Here's Jiwon of Spica for BNT International, back in March 2014: Source: Omona They Didn't . Spica disbanded last month. :( And here's Irene of Red Velvet for  Instyle Korea , March 2016: Source: Omona They Didn't Now, needless to say, these photos have been smoothed and blurred and color-altered to hell. Because every irregularity of color and texture has been airbrushed away, there's a sharp contrast between skin and blush, a contrast that I'm not sure is achievable in real life. But that hasn't stopped me from searching for a blush that can deliver a subtle, yet not quite natural, cotton-candy flush. By the time I began my quest, the NARS Final Cut collection had come and gone, and with it my platonic pink blush, Sex Fantasy  (lol). I thought about buying NARS Gaiety instead, bu...

A short list for a short month! New Makeup: NARS blush in Threesome: $30 NYX Butter Gloss in Blackberry Pie: $5 Yay, I managed to buy just two new pieces of makeup! One was carefully planned, while the other (the BLACK LIP GLOSS, obviously) was a Target impulse buy. Unfortunately, I'm not thrilled with either one. From the photos I saw on Instagram, I expected NARS Threesome to be a little cooler and purpler than it is. And because it's such a light color (seriously, it's almost white), I have to use quite a bit of product to get it to show up. I don't dislike it, exactly, but it's not what I expected. Yet another reason to swatch before buying, damn it. NYX Blackberry Pie has the opposite problem: it's way more pigmented than I thought it would be. I've owned three other Butter Glosses, all of which delivered a nice hit of color but were definitely on the sheer side, and I bought Blackberry Pie hoping it would be that sheer black lip color I've been ...