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Showing posts from July, 2017

Some Thoughts on NARS and "Cruelty-Free" Beauty

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Last month, NARS shocked many of its customers by announcing that it was expanding into China, whose government requires animal testing on all imported beauty products. Like most successful smaller beauty brands, NARS is already owned by a larger, non-CF brand (Shiseido, in NARS' case), but it has not allowed such testing on its own products since its founding in 1994. Now that's about to change, and quite a few NARS loyalists are upset, including prominent cruelty-free bloggers and YouTubers like Killer Colours  and JKissa . I'm far from a prominent blogger, but I thought I'd take this opportunity to discuss my views on NARS and the larger debate over cruelty-free beauty. NARS x Guy Bourdin, Holiday 2013 ( source ). First, a little about my current stance. If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you'll know that while I strongly favor cruelty-free brands, I'm not exclusively cruelty-free. This accords with my views on meat-eating: I'm mostl

Reverse Lipstick Chronology #4: ColourPop Lippie Stix in Let's Play

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Needless to say, I wasn't feeling entirely celebratory this Independence Day, but I also wasn't going to miss the chance to wear blue highlighter and metallic red lipstick at the same time. I thought I'd use this FOTD post to write a quick review of a product I bought back in November: ColourPop Lippie Stix in Let's Play, part of last year's ColourPop x Hello Kitty collaboration. Growing up, I owned dozens of Sanrio items: sticker albums, mechanical pencils, stuffed animals, keychains — and, most '90s of all, a red Hello Kitty fanny pack that I still have at my mom's house. I remember chewing Keroppi gum and receiving a set of Pochacco nail polishes for a birthday present. I remember going to FAO Schwarz , the legendary (and now sadly closed) New York toy store, and putting a coin in a giant light-up Hello Kitty that spat out a paper fortune. In other words, there was no way I could let ColourPop's Hello Kitty collection pass me by. To my credit, I limi