Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

For the past few years, I've been performing two beauty-related rites of spring. The first rite involves destashing a bunch of lipsticks (more on that soon). The second rite consists of searching for a pinky-red coral lipstick and a lavender blush. Those searches usually end in failure, though for different reasons. There are thousands of coral lipsticks on the market, but only a small percentage of corals flatter me. Most lavender and lavender-pink blushes flatter me, but only a small percentage of blushes are lavender. I've tried so many coral lipsticks that made me look dead and so many blushes that promised lavender but delivered neutral pink. I should have learned my lesson by now. Yet every spring, without fail, I take up the quest again. This year's coral lipstick and lavender blush come from the same source: ColourPop's Spring 2018 Butterfly Collection . Like many ColourPop collections, it comprises an overwhelming number of new products: eight Lux Lipsticks, ...

Disclaimer: I purchased this product with store credit from my Glossier affiliate link . I am not (heaven forfend) a Glossier rep. Welcome to the second of my seven Glossier reviews! At this rate, I'll probably get to the seventh product before the 2020 election, but I'm not making any promises. This post is a review of the Haloscope highlighter in Quartz ($22 for 0.19 oz). Glossier describes  Haloscope as a "dew effect highlighter" with an "outer halo...infused with genuine crystal extracts for all-day enlightenment" and "a solid oil core of vitamin-rich moisturizers for a hydrated, dewy finish." New-Agey Goop-speak aside (what the hell is a "crystal extract"?), Haloscope is a familiar product: a cream highlighter in chubby stick form. The formula is currently available in three shades: Quartz, a champagne pink; Topaz, a deep bronze; and Moonstone, a silvery white. I had no trouble choosing a shade: Topaz looked too dark for me (a shame,...

Earlier this year, as I sat watching a YouTube makeup video — a review of some gimmicky product, maybe Farsali Unicorn Oil or Ciaté Glitter Flip lipsticks — my boyfriend walked past and wondered, "Do you actually buy anything you see on YouTube?" With some pride, I said no. I'm generally immune to YouTube hype, since most influencers gravitate toward products and looks that aren't even close to my style. I use their reviews and tutorials as a brain break, a 15-minute period during which I don't have to think about my dissertation defense (Dec. 7, bitches!) or Trump or Harvey Weinstein or whether I'll have a source of income next semester. But let me not be too smug. Watching consumerist videos for fun means participating in consumerism. It means that I come home from a day of passively absorbing the advertising that we all encounter as we move through the world, and I voluntarily expose myself to yet more  advertising. And, inevitably, some of those messages w...

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...