Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Something different today: a mini-review of something that isn't makeup! You've probably noticed that my obsession with color makeup is several orders of magnitude greater than my interest in skincare, brushes, haircare, or "boring makeup" (mascara, brow stuff, concealer, etc). But for variety's sake, I thought I'd write about a new tool that's been amusing me for the past month and a half. What's more, it's a tool that I use to apply "boring makeup"! Since I don't wear foundation, I miss out on a whole category of beauty-world hype. Last year, the internet went crazy over Beauty Blenders (and knockoffs thereof), but I paid no attention until I became aware of the mini versions. Because, of course, I do  wear base makeup: I apply NARS Radiant Creamy Concealer in Vanilla to my gruesome undereye circles almost every day. I'd never had much trouble blending it out with my fingers, but during my last trip to Ulta, I picked up a four-p

Hey! I promise that my blog still exists and that I'm still alive. Look, I even have a pin to prove it: Appropriately, I took this photo while waiting outside my therapist's office. However, posts have been scarce this month for a few reasons: I don't know where my money will come from after August, where I'll be living, or whether I'll even stay in academia, so most of my energy has been devoted to sorting that out I'll probably be defending my dissertation in a few months and it needs a lot of editing plus an introduction, hahaha kill me I've been revising an article that I want to send off again by the end of the month The weather has been shitty and overcast for most of May, limiting my ability to take decent photos Literally everything else in the world is awful?? I have a habit of announcing a blog hiatus only to write a post two days later, so I'm not going to do that now, but I think it's fair to say that posting may be slow over the next fe

I've owned two Glossier Generation G lipsticks, Jam and Cake , for over a year now, and I wear both pretty regularly. They have their flaws (enumerated in the reviews I've linked), but I love the ease and subtlety of the sheer matte finish. So when I heard that ColourPop was releasing a new lipstick formula that seemed, shall we say, inspired by the Generation G formula, I had to order a couple of shades for comparison. For the record, it doesn't bother me that ColourPop more or less ripped off Glossier's idea. Glossier has ripped off quite a few ideas from Asian skincare, and anyway, that's how the beauty industry works: one brand comes up with a general idea, and other brands improve upon it, and the consumer gets a wider range of choices. While Glossier offers six shades of Generation G, ColourPop's Blotted Lip lineup comprises 11 shades , with a further eight in the liquid-to-matte Ultra Blotted Lip range. All of the BL and UBL shades have names that evoke

Now that beauty-throwback trends have slid forward in time from the Brown '90s to the Iridescent '90s, brands are releasing a flood of metallic lipsticks — or, at least, what they call  "metallic lipsticks." But there tends to be a huge amount of variation between one formula and another, and even between one shade and another. Some "metallic" shades have an even sheen; others have big chunks of glitter; others shift their color depending on the angle and light. Can all of these finishes really be described by the same adjective? I THINK NOT. So I present to you... You might have to enlarge the image to see all of my neurotic little notes, but the main point I'm trying to make in this flow chart is that whether a lipstick can be classified as "metallic" depends on 1) the size of the shiny particles and 2) the color of the particles relative to the base color. I define a metallic lipstick as one with an even sheen (i.e. no visibly discrete part