Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Welcome to another installment of my not-actually-monthly compilation of monthly favorites! Some bloggers use favorites posts to spotlight new purchases, but I prefer to feature older favorites as well as non-makeup discoveries. Let's begin with my main makeup fixation in June: Purple Lipstick Purple has been my favorite lip color since I started wearing lipstick regularly, and its entrance into the mainstream in the last few years has given me an overabundance of options. I currently own six purple lipsticks, and five of them saw a good amount of wear last month (odd one out: the cyborgian NYX Castle ). The second half of June was unusually overcast and cool, and purple lipstick always seems as appropriate for cloudy summer days as coral lipstick does for sunny ones. Counterclockwise from top right (that is, light to dark): Maybelline Lilac Flush, Maybelline Brazen Berry, MAC Up the Amp, Bite Lip Lab custom lipstick, & Other Stories Droguet Purple.  Swatched, same order: One o...

Early this month, just after returning from England, I started my summer job in the university archives. These archives house documents related to the history of the university, over a century's worth of senior theses, and the lifelong correspondence of some prominent alumni. My job for the summer is to reprocess the papers of one such alum, a New York-based lawyer who was involved in the founding of the League of Nations, though he later resigned in disgust at the American government's reluctance to get involved in anything resembling international cooperation. My task is to sit in the basement and reorganize a huge collection of letters written and received between 1917 and 1951. I've spent 15 hours with this collection and am up to the summer of 1922, and I've been working pretty efficiently, so you can imagine how many papers are involved. This might sound like a tedious job, but I've been enjoying it immensely. As most of you know, I specialize in Renaissance l...

Well, I guess that was an eight-day hiatus! It crept up on me, as such things do. First the weather was gloomy for days on end, so I couldn't take decent photos. Then I took an overnight trip to visit a friend in another city. Then I spent a couple of days in DC for research, which was very pleasant until Wednesday afternoon, when I tripped over a curb in Capitol Hill, face-planted on the sidewalk, slammed my knee against the concrete, shattered my phone screen, and started sobbing, mostly from embarrassment. Now I'm back home, nursing my various bruises and preparing to leave for winter break tomorrow. In addition to the physical clouds that have interfered with my photography, I've had a cloud of writer's block hanging over me for at least a month now. The writer's block is mostly academic, but it's also cast a shadow over my beauty blogging. In both cases, it's not so much that I don't know what to write; in fact, I have all too many ideas. The probl...

In the last year, my local supermarket has begun stocking the latest OPI and Essie releases, which is both an incentive to go grocery shopping and a severe test of my willpower. I've been disenchanted with Essie for a while now, but OPI has impressed me over and over with the quality of its formula and the creativity of its shades. First Class Desires, whose bougie name cracks me up, is part of the 16-piece Holiday 2014 collection. The theme of this collection is rather mysterious. OPI reports that it's inspired by Gwen Stefani, but the shade names and colors are typically "holiday," and Stefani already lent her name to last year's holiday collection. Not that it really matters to me: I know almost nothing about Gwen Stefani except for that awkward Harajuku Girls phase in 2004. More important, from my magpie point of view, is that this polish is complex and sparkly and pretty much flawless. First Class Desires is a deep plum packed with gold microglitter. This p...