Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Ugh, you guys. I'm so sorry. You know the drill: some months are busier than others in academia, and until January I'll be very busy indeed. Here are my responsibilities for the next few months: Finish my dissertation (I'm defending in December!) Teach five overcrowded sections of a science-fiction survey course Go on the completely fucked academic job market for the third year in a row Revise and resubmit my third peer-reviewed article Figure out how I'm going to support myself next semester Cook meals, exercise, maintain relationships with other humans As you can imagine, this leaves me with almost no time to blog about beauty. Hell, I barely even have time to  read  about beauty. While I believe that breaks from work are important, blogging is a special case because it's yet another kind of writing. It's very different from academic writing, of course, but it uses the same parts of the brain and demands the same kind of energy, and that energy is finite. Afte...

After three and a half years (!) of beauty blogging, I've learned which panning projects work for me and which are guaranteed to fail. I can usually push myself to finish a piece of makeup if three conditions apply: It's a cream product (usually a lipstick) I like it enough that I've already used up at least 2/3 of it It's getting old and/or is in poor condition I believe that makeup should be a pleasure, so if I actively dislike a product, I'll destash it instead of forcing myself to finish it. If it's newer or in good condition, I'd rather just keep it around and wear it when I feel like it. And if it's almost full, I don't see much point in panning it: that's just setting myself up for frustration. So, as you can imagine, I don't undertake panning projects very often. But I managed to finish two lipsticks (Urban Decay Streak and MAC Up the Amp) earlier this year, and right now I have four more that I think I can pan by the end of 2017. All...

I am not a serial depotter of beauty products. I admire people with a more utilitarian approach to makeup, people for whom packaging means little to nothing. But I'm not one of those people, and I probably never will be. I don't insist on the fanciest, most elaborate compacts and tubes: MAC lipsticks are some of my favorites, design-wise. But I'd rather leave an eyeshadow in its original case, even at the expense of precious shelf space, than depot it into a magnetic palette. There's just too much risk involved in prying makeup out of its exoskeleton, and the end result is often depressingly ugly. That said, there are times when I find depotting necessary. If a product's packaging is damaged to the point that it endangers either the makeup or me, I'd rather depot it than leave it in an unusable shell. When the mirror on my theBalm Nude 'Tude palette developed a huge crack, I reflected that it was probably  a bad idea to have broken glass near a product I pu...

One of the less charming aspects of being an American millennial in 2017 is getting called a "special snowflake" by old bigots on the internet. From my occasional perusal of right-wing Twitter accounts (I discovered last year that my mild-mannered undergrad Shakespeare professor is an alt-right conspiracy theorist, and I'm still not over it), I gather that special-snowflakery consists of wanting a living wage, universal healthcare, Nazi-free public discourse, and a modest decrease in mass shootings. In that spirit, I nominate Topshop Glow Stick in Otherworldly as the official highlighter of millennial special snowflakes, not only because of its color (white as the driven, pre-dog-pee snow) but also because it's as jankily constructed as our government these days. And because Topshop is a British brand and Brexit was the first event that made me wonder if Trump really could become president (though I do think that's a false equivalence in many ways). And because m...