Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

I'm back, bearing makeup! For the first time in the 4.5-year history of Auxiliary Beauty, I went over a month without blogging. A lot happened in those six weeks: I moved to a new apartment with my boyfriend; finished my summer job at a university office and began an adjunct gig in Jersey City; got more serious about my creative writing and completed a short story for the first time in nearly a decade; and prepared my materials for one last go at the academic job market. So, yeah, not a lot of time for blogging. Now that things have settled down a bit, I'm hoping I can return to my schedule of two or three posts per month. Oh, and I made it through my August replacement-only no-buy successfully...well, sort of. I placed a ColourPop order at 8:30 pm on August 31 because they were having a sitewide 25%-off sale and I didn't know how long it would last, but I'm still counting that as a victory. I ordered four powder eyeshadows, one Jelly Much eyeshadow, and one Lux Lipsti...

In my personal taxonomy, most makeup falls into one of four categories: 1) products that I collect actively (lipstick, eyeshadow, nail polish); 2) products that I own in limited numbers because I use them very slowly and/or don't find them exciting (blush, highlighter, eyeliner); 3) products that I wear regularly but purchase only when I run out because they straight-up bore me (brow stuff, mascara, concealer); 4) products that simply have no place in my routine (foundation, bronzer, contour). And then there's lip gloss. I've been wearing it on and off for years, but I can't decide how I feel about it. I fall in love with a specific kind of gloss (opaque, sparkly, sheer, whatever); buy a few shades in that category; decide after a few months that gloss in general isn't for me; and then, about a year later, repeat the whole cycle of fickleness. In my early makeup-wearing days, I favored opaque cream-finish glosses in bold colors, like  Revlon Fire  and YSL Rouge Goua...