Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Almost exactly four years ago , I posted my recipe for pumpkin-walnut-chocolate-chip cookies, which I've made at least once every autumn since, including this morning. These cookies are my humble attempt to replicate the ones that used to be (and still are, for all I know) sold at the coffee shop in my college library. Here's today's iteration: I've tweaked the recipe a bit since 2014, so I thought I'd post an update for those of you interested in making them, which everyone should be. Note that the walnuts and chocolate chips aren't mandatory at all (though they are, of course, highly recommended). INGREDIENTS: 1 cup plain canned pumpkin (this is a little less than a standard 15-oz. can) 1/2 cup sugar (you can use a bit less or more, depending on preferred sweetness level and presence/absence of chocolate chips. I used 1/2 cup today and wish I'd used less) 1/3 cup vegetable oil 1 egg 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 tsp. baking powder  1 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. m...

Last week I went vegan, with the exception of the occasional splash of milk in my coffee (I'm sorry, non-dairy milk is not the same). I'd been meaning to do this experiment for at least a year, but something always came up. Either I had a lot of cheese in my fridge that I needed to eat before it spoiled, or there was a new cheese-based recipe that I wanted to try, or I started thinking what a shame it would be if I was hit by a bus during my vegan week and died without having tried every kind of cheese available at Whole Foods. I really like cheese, guys. Last month, though, I resolved that my vegan week would start as soon as I returned from the UK. It was perfect timing: there were no dairy products in my apartment and I simply refrained from buying new ones. There were a few reasons why I decided to dabble in veganism. The first was ethical. I've been mostly vegetarian for five years, also for ethical reasons; I eat fish about once a month and meat a few times a year, wh...

This March has felt about twice as long as a normal month, and it's still not over. I can't explain what made it seem so interminable. Maybe it was that we were teased repeatedly with the promise of spring, yet the vernal equinox nine days ago brought us this: Whatever the reason, this was a long and rather stressful month, and I clung more fiercely than ever to small material delights like lipstick and baking and k-pop music videos. I enjoy reading other bloggers' roundups of their monthly makeup favorites, but since my own beauty routine is pretty consistent and my new purchases are pretty infrequent (though less infrequent than they should be), I've never felt qualified to do my own monthly list of favorite beauty products. I've been thinking, though, that I'd like to start a tradition of listing all my favorites, beauty and otherwise, at the end of each month. I want to acknowledge those small ephemeral pleasures that make day-to-day life more enjoyable but...

Yes, I know it's Tuesday (Wednesday, in some time zones), but I wore this makeup yesterday. Deal with it. Last week, Pantone revealed its color of the year for 2015: Marsala, a soft plummy brown. Pantone's color of the year is supposed to predict trends in fashion, makeup, and interior design, though these days it seems more cause than prediction, given how quickly beauty brands jump on the Pantone bandwagon every year. I'm anticipating a host of "how to wear Marsala for spring" articles come February: let's be honest, it's a decidedly A/W color. But the weather is A/W as we speak (more W than A this wet, gusty evening), so I'm all for it. Marsala already has its detractors. Tanya Basu of the Atlantic argues that the color evokes "rust, the grimy, gag-inducing type that lines corners or frat boy dormitory-style bathrooms," or "the '70s-era carpets that lined offices and industrial spaces, created to disguise wear-and-tear from fo...

...but first, some whining about the weather. It's October, yet every morning is still oppressively humid. The sky has been choked with thick gray clouds for the past week. Today I woke up, showered, then realized that with the humidity at 90%, my hair would take hours to air-dry. I got out the blow-dryer, which I almost never do, and ended up looking like a Korean boy-band member, my hair simultaneously lank and feathered. Now for my makeup--but thanks to the film of moisture all over my face and neck, nothing would stick. Each product melted off before I'd finished putting the next one on. Finally I resigned myself to mascara and matte lipstick and headed out the door. After a fifteen-minute walk, every inch of my skin felt clammy. My hair was still wet. I tried to take off my blazer, but the cloth was clinging so closely to my bare forearms that the lining of one of the sleeves ripped loudly. To hell with this weather . Because of the persistent cloud cover, I haven't b...

Let's make some popsicles! But before we do, let's travel back in time to the '90s, when AB was a bb. I remember going to the supermarket with my parents and staring at the phrase printed on every tub of ice cream and box of ice pops: "Quiescently Frozen Confection." What did it mean ? It sounded like a magic spell. Then came adulthood, Google, and the reduction of magic to mundane facts. It turns out that "quiescently frozen confection" is a a legal term guaranteeing that a food product contains a certain percentage of milk solids and a certain combination of ingredients. (If you scan the phrase as you would a line of poetry, it's a trio of amphibrachs: short-long-short, short-long-short, short-long-short.) "Quiescent" simply means "stationary," and indicates that the product hasn't been stirred or shaken during the freezing process. But despite knowing all this, I still feel a childish thrill whenever I see the phrase. The ...