Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Glossier keeps coming up with new marketing strategies to put me off and new products to tempt me back in. No sooner had I planned a post on Glossier's MLM-esque rep program than they released a fucking birthday-cake-scented lip balm with sparkles and holographic packaging. I have a price, and Glossier knows it. So this post will be a two-parter: a review of Birthday Balm Dotcom, followed by one of my usual rants against the marriage of social media and late capitalism. Who says we can't have our cake and eat it too? *** PART 1: THE REVIEW *** Birthday is Glossier's collaboration with Milk Bar , the dessert arm of the Momofuku restaurant empire. The pairing makes a lot of sense: like Glossier, Milk Bar sells overpriced, overhyped products in small portions, but damned if its aesthetic isn't on point. Here's the "Cereal Milk" soft-serve I had last October in Williamsburg; it was tasty, but who wants soft-serve without a cone? Give me Mister Softee any day...

I have dry lips. Like, really dry. No matter the weather, no matter the season, there's always a possibility that I'll wake up with my lower lip chapped or cracked or even bleeding. This has been the state of things for as long as I can remember, and I have yet to find a solution more effective than sleeping with thick lip balm, replenishing it as soon as I wake up, and wearing it under almost every lip color. (My favorite lip balm these days is Palmer's Cocoa Butter Formula .) This routine usually ensures that I don't walk around with open wounds on my mouth, but with the recent chill and winds on the East Coast, the situation has become critical. I've had to be choosier about the lipsticks I wear, and since winter brings dry lips to many of us, I thought a post about my favorite lipstick formulas would be timely. Literature scholars love pretending to be scientists or mathematicians, so bear with me while I explain the rubric I worked out after several false start...

I have a very specific packaging fetish: I like things in small round tins. But really, could you resist this particular tin? Vaseline Lip Therapy in Rosy Lips is only the latest in a series of Tins I Have Loved. My first makeup products, when I was a young teenager, were Perfumeria Gal redcurrant and violet lip balms in domed Art Nouveau tins: ( Source ) One of my most vivid memories from my first semester of college is of eating Les Anis de Flavigny rose- and violet-flavored pastilles in my dorm room overlooking the campus lake (I was a foppish 17-year-old):   ( Source ) So it's no wonder that the little discs of Vaseline Lip Therapy caught my eye at a grocery store the other day. There were three colors: blue (original), green (aloe vera), and coral-pink (rose). I'd never seen them in the States, so I barely hesitated before buying a tin of Rosy Lips for £2.19, despite my misgivings about the formula: I've been known to smear Vaseline on my lips on especially dry winter...