Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

A short list for a short month! New Makeup: NARS blush in Threesome: $30 NYX Butter Gloss in Blackberry Pie: $5 Yay, I managed to buy just two new pieces of makeup! One was carefully planned, while the other (the BLACK LIP GLOSS, obviously) was a Target impulse buy. Unfortunately, I'm not thrilled with either one. From the photos I saw on Instagram, I expected NARS Threesome to be a little cooler and purpler than it is. And because it's such a light color (seriously, it's almost white), I have to use quite a bit of product to get it to show up. I don't dislike it, exactly, but it's not what I expected. Yet another reason to swatch before buying, damn it. NYX Blackberry Pie has the opposite problem: it's way more pigmented than I thought it would be. I've owned three other Butter Glosses, all of which delivered a nice hit of color but were definitely on the sheer side, and I bought Blackberry Pie hoping it would be that sheer black lip color I've been ...

Hello from the UK! I've spent the last two days recovering from jet lag, with the help of some delicious scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and herbs (imagine me pronouncing the H): Overview: This roundup is going to be brief, because I bought almost no new makeup in May. After several months on this low-buy, it's become easier to postpone purchases, and even to postpone them indefinitely. No matter how much I want something, I can usually persuade myself that at least one of four things is true: 1) I already own a similar product; 2) even if I don't, the shiny new product will still be around in a month; 3) even if the product is limited edition, something similar will be released eventually; 4) even if I don't end up with the product or a dupe, life will carry on exactly as before. Granted, it's also easier to avoid buying new makeup when I'm depressed, and I was fairly depressed last month. But I'd like to believe that depression isn't the only explana...

Wow, it feels like it's been forever since I last posted here. And indeed it has been forever —well, 11 days in Earth time, but forever in blog time. March has been a trying month so far, due to various academic stuff that I won't get into here because this is a beauty blog and not a bitch-about-grad-school blog, but this week is spring break and I'm trying to be aggressively nice to myself. Yesterday I took the train into New York for brunch with a friend I've known for almost ten years (!), and we ate delicious lemon-ricotta pancakes and speculated about the feasibility of burning down the academy. Then we went to the Upper West Side Sephora, conveniently located a few blocks from the brunch place. My friend bought a Bite Amuse Bouche lipstick in Sangria, a rich fuchsia, and I bought my first Marc Jacobs lipstick in So Sofia, a pinky-red coral. (I tried on a few pink and coral Amuse Bouches as well, but none of them flattered me. It was weird.) And then I got an iced...

Sorry I've been posting so erratically this month! I usually try for one post every three days, but lately it's been two posts in two days, then a break of five or six days, then two more posts in two days. I'm trying not to beat myself up about it, because inspiration comes and goes for us all, but I'm hoping I can get into a more regular pattern soon. I blame March. It's an untrustworthy month in so many ways, and it leads me to do untrustworthy things like make an Ulta order when I've already announced a March-long no-buy on my blog. "Holy magenta!" really was the phrase that popped into my head when I first saw swatches of NYX's new Intense Butter Gloss in Spice Cake. (My fingers keep wanting to type "Space Cake," for some reason. It's true that the deep shiny fuchsia-magenta is the sort of lip color one would wear to an intergalactic rave.) Despite my love for NYX's original Butter Glosses (I reviewed Peach Cobbler and Raspb...

It feels like I've been waiting forever to post these reviews. When Ulta had a 40%-off sale on NYX and Revlon two weeks ago, I seized the chance to order a few things I'd been wanting for a while. (I came in $.77 over the $25 free-shipping minimum, which made me inordinately proud.) My order arrived this past Tuesday, but I forced myself not to open the package until I'd submitted an article I'd been refusing to let go. I did that on Wednesday, but the next four days were cloudy and rainy, which meant that I had almost no natural light by which to photograph my new goodies. Long story short: the weather, my schedule, and my neuroses didn't line up until today. So today I present, from left to right: Revlon Lip Butter in Red Velvet, NYX Slide-On Eye Pencil in Golden Bronze, NYX Jumbo Pencil in Iced Mocha, Revlon Lacquer Balm in Coy, NYX Round Lipstick in Castle, Revlon Colorburst Lip Gloss in Embellished. Warning: embarrassment of photos ahead. Revlon Lip Butter in...