Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

I just did some day drinking with a friend to celebrate our last day of teaching this semester, so it's fair to say that I won't be getting any work done this evening. But a single dark & stormy (yes, I'm a lightweight) hardly prevents me from blogging. I've done a lot of product reviews recently, so I thought I'd break up the monotony with a tag I found on the blog Chic Dabbling . Some beauty tags have weirdly farfetched questions ("what would you do if you woke up in the middle of the night and a thief was making off with your nail polish collection?"), but this one is refreshingly straightforward! Warning: it's a long questionnaire and I'm as wordy as ever. You might need your own dark & stormy to make it through this post. 1. Do you remember your first makeup item? I'm not entirely sure which makeup item was my very first, but it may have been the clear Revlon Moon Drops lipstick my grandma bought me when I was 12 or 13. It came in ...

I still haven't had a chance to take decent blog pictures in London, so here's a beauty meme, taken from the lovely Teresa at brush and bullet ! (I'm retaining the Commonwealth spelling because I'm in the Commonwealth as we speak. It's only fair.) ETA: I just realized that I forgot to copy and paste questions 17-30! I've been so distracted recently. Updated 9/13.  1. Is your hair naturally curly or straight? It's very wavy, but not quite curly. 2. What is your natural hair colour? Dark brown with a few auburn highlights. 3. Do you dye it yourself or go to a salon? I have virgin hair! 4. How often do you wash your hair? Every day. My hair is quite fine, and it looks limp and greasy if I go more than 36 hours without washing it. 5. Do you wear the same style every day or change it? At its current length, there's not much I can do with it except leave it down! When it was longer (about chin-length), I'd occasionally pin it into an awkward "bun...

From Sleep and Water , a wonderful Australian beauty blog I just discovered. I would love to see other people do this—seriously, I never get tired of hearing about lipstick. 1. How many lipsticks do you own? 49, plus five glosses. I plan to get rid of about ten lipsticks after I finish my chronology. 2. What was the first lipstick you owned? Revlon Certainly Red, but I returned it so quickly that I’m not sure it counts. The first lipstick I both owned and wore regularly was Revlon Carnation, from the now-discontinued Colorburst line. I’m a little embarrassed about this one, because it’s a shimmery bubblegum pink and I wore it to graduate classes at my stuffy university like it wasn’t even a thing. 3. What is your favourite lipstick brand? The brand with the biggest representation in my collection is Revlon (followed at a great distance by MAC), but I’d own a lot more NARS and YSL if my budget permitted. Really, though, I don’t have one favorite brand; I’m just a fuchsia and ...

Well, I guess it was inevitable: I have a makeup blog with a pretentious literary-allusive title now. Elsewhere on the internet, I’m modernfoppery ; offline (or still online, given how often I procrastinate), I’m a 26-year-old grad student working toward a doctorate in English literature, with a focus on the 17th century. The phrase “auxiliary beauty” comes from one of the first English dictionaries: A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew , published in 1699 (and available in a modern edition as The First English Dictionary of Slang ). The author, the mysterious “B. E., Gent.,” defines “auxiliary beauty” as “Dress, Paint, Patches, setting of Eye-brows, and licking the Lipps with red.” Most descriptions of cosmetics at the time were as dismissive as this one, and I like the idea of reclaiming the phrase for an unabashedly pro-makeup project. I haven’t always been pro-makeup; in fact, I didn’t wear any makeup but concealer and clear lip balm until I ...