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, ...

(Settle in. This will be a long post.) First, some personal news: I defended my doctoral dissertation earlier this month and now have a Ph.D. in English! At my university, the dissertation defense (our official term, hilariously, is "Final Public Oral") is a pretty lowkey affair. It consists of a 30-minute presentation and another 30 minutes of questions from your dissertation committee and others at the FPO (professors outside your committee, friends, et al). Having attended several defenses before my own, I knew that most of the "questions" would be rambling suggestions from my four advisors on how to revise my dissertation into a book manuscript, and that I wouldn't be required to "defend" my work in any meaningful sense. Still, I was pretty nervous in the two weeks leading up to my defense. So I promised myself that if I got through it alive, I could order myself a truly extravagant present: Pat McGrath Labs' $38 LuxeTrance lipstick in Madame G...

This is, what, the third purple lip color I've reviewed in the last month? Oh, well. I don't think it's possible to be a lipstick-loving k-pop fan without developing a curiosity about Korean lip tints. I'd had my eye out for a tint since last year, but most of the tints available in the US seemed to come in very bright colors (orange and pink being the most popular) and watery, ultra-staining formulas that I knew would dry the hell out of my lips. By the time I visited oo35mm , a deceptively tiny store in New York's Chinatown with an impressive selection of Asian (mostly Korean and Japanese) beauty products, I'd pretty much given up on finding a relatively non-drying lip tint in my preferred purply color family. I was actually at oo35mm for skincare: I wanted a Salux exfoliating body washcloth, which I'd read about in this Into the Gloss post (see, I do like ITG sometimes), as well as some sheet masks from brands I hadn't yet tried. But when I saw the T...

I own between 55 and 60 lipsticks, more than a few of them purple. It's rare that a mainstream brand releases a lipstick unlike any I own, and even rarer that a mainstream brand releases a purple unlike any I own (yes, I'm using a lipstick junkie's definition of "unlike," but still). So when Bite Beauty announced that it was expanding its newish Amuse Bouche line with six new shades, one of them a luminous blue-toned lavender that looked like no purple lipstick I'd seen before, I took notice. Bite's "Sweet and Savory" collection for Summer 2016 comprises three dark "savory" shades ( Kale, a blackened green; Squid Ink, a navy blue; and Whiskey, a deep brown similar to MAC Antique Velvet ) and three purply "sweet" shades (Taro, a dark grayish purple; Thistle, a lilac-taupe in the ColourPop Trap family; and Lavender Jam, an "electric blue-violet"). So far as I know, all of them are permanent except the two purples, Ta...