Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Name: NYX Round Lipstick in Perfect Date Purchased: August 2013   Grade: B Notes: The blunt self-congratulation of the name "Perfect" makes me want to start a line of self-deprecating lipsticks: "Good Enough." "Decent Pigmentation for the Price." "Let's Be Real, This Is a Half-Assed Knockoff of a MAC Limited Edition Lipstick." A name like "Perfect" begs for either confirmation or deflation, and in this case, I'm afraid I'll have to go with the latter. It's not perfect. But it is, perhaps, good enough. Perfect is the very embodiment of the phrase "work-appropriate": a pinkish mauve-ish MLBB color. I bought it hoping for an opaque version of NARS Dolce Vita, and I do think the two are quite similar color-wise. This photo makes Perfect look slightly warmer than it is, but the swatch below is more color-accurate: Like the other NYX Round Lipsticks I've tried, Perfect has a creamy, heavy, slippery formula. It g...

“His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.” This is Vladimir Nabokov's description of Professor Timofey Pnin, the hapless protagonist of Pnin (1957), but it is also a perfect description of me. I am very, very absent-minded. If I'm asked to do two things at once, my brain will simply refuse to focus on one of those tasks, which means that any object involved in that task runs the risk of getting lost. Sometimes that object is a lipstick. And the more I use any given lipstick, the greater the chance that I will leave it at a coffee shop or in a library bathroom. Which explains why I found myself at CVS two days ago, repurchasing two of my favorite neutral lipsticks, both by Revlon: a Lip Butter in Pink Truffle and a Colorburst Matte Balm in Sultry. I'd had Pink Truffle for nearly a year and had used up most of it before i...

Name: Laura Mercier Sheer Lipstick in Bare Lips Date of Purchase: Late 2011 Grade: B+ Notes: Bare Lips was my first high-end beauty purchase, and my first purchase—though, sadly for my grad-student wallet, not my last—from the Bluemercury a few blocks from campus. Unfortunately for poor Bare Lips, it’s become linked in my mind with my trip to Seattle in January 2012, which would have been nothing more than a lovely reunion with old friends if my suitcase, containing almost all the clothes I owned, hadn’t disappeared somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle. “We’ve had a lot of thefts from the baggage carousel recently,” said the nonchalant airport employee. I cried almost constantly for the next few days, until my suitcase turned up at the Seattle airport, having been mislabeled in San Francisco and put on the wrong airline. So all ended well, but I’ll always associate the strong cotton-candy scent of Bare Lips with that ordeal. Sorry, BL. Not your fault. But look how mu...

Name: MAC Lustre Lipstick in Capricious Date of Purchase: August 2011 Grade: B Notes: Capricious was my very first non-drugstore lipstick, purchased from the MAC counter at the Nordstrom near my old high school in San Francisco. (How’s that for a panoply of prepositional phrases?) Capricious has a lustre finish, which means that it’s glossy and sheer and, at least for me, somewhat drying—I think the culprit is the shimmer lurking in the formula. Despite this, I wore Capricious almost every day that fall. It’s a reddish plumberry color that will make you look nice, if you’re into that. A fairly heavy swatch--you can see how sheer the Lustres are. If this were a different color, it would look uneven on my lips, but it's so close to my natural lip color that it blends in seamlessly. Wait, that color looks familiar. A dupe, a palpable dupe! The differences between Capricious (right) and Revlon Mauvy Night lie in formula and saturation, not in color. Mauvy Night is more opaque a...

Name: Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Mauvy Night Date of Purchase: June 2011 Grade: A- Notes: (Here I am again, Tristram Shandying my way through my archive of tumblr posts, pretending to be the me of a month ago.) I promise that this tumblr will stop being a Revlon blog very soon; I just bought a lot of Revlon lipsticks in my early days of makeup collecting. No regrets, though. Drugstore lipsticks are great for figuring out what colors you like and hate, and they’re actually much better now than they were when I was starting out. The past two years have seen something of a drugstore-makeup revolution, with Revlon Lip Butters and Maybelline Vivids and Rimmel liquid lipsticks—hyper-refinements of color and formula that didn’t exist in the aisles of CVS in 2011. In early June of that year, I saw Midnight in Paris with some grad-school friends. It was far from my favorite Woody Allen film, but I fell in love with Marion Cotillard’s makeup look: When we think of ’20s lipsti...