Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Yes, I know it's Tuesday (Wednesday, in some time zones), but I wore this makeup yesterday. Deal with it. Last week, Pantone revealed its color of the year for 2015: Marsala, a soft plummy brown. Pantone's color of the year is supposed to predict trends in fashion, makeup, and interior design, though these days it seems more cause than prediction, given how quickly beauty brands jump on the Pantone bandwagon every year. I'm anticipating a host of "how to wear Marsala for spring" articles come February: let's be honest, it's a decidedly A/W color. But the weather is A/W as we speak (more W than A this wet, gusty evening), so I'm all for it. Marsala already has its detractors. Tanya Basu of the Atlantic argues that the color evokes "rust, the grimy, gag-inducing type that lines corners or frat boy dormitory-style bathrooms," or "the '70s-era carpets that lined offices and industrial spaces, created to disguise wear-and-tear from fo...

BABY, ALL I WANT IS TO LET IT GO AIN'T NO WORRIES, NO WE CAN DANCE ALL NIGHT... Ahem. On my previous trip to the UK, I limited my Topshop damage to two nail polishes and an eyeshadow . This time I was eager to try one of Topshop's many lip products, and I settled on the Matte Lip Bullet in Get Me Bodied (£8), a dark magenta-plum. Topshop's Lip Bullets are thin twist-up lipsticks in matte black-and-white tubes with clear plastic caps. The white plastic looks sleek when new, but it can easily get messy if you remove or replace the cap too hastily. The testers in the Topshop store looked downright gory. The Lip Bullets come in two finishes, satin and matte; slapdash Google research indicates that the satin bullets came out last year and the matte ones this summer. They’re not crayons, exactly, because the bullet has the slanted head of a traditional lipstick—and because Topshop has wasted no time in capitalizing on the lip-crayon trend with its own line of crayons, which I...

Apologies for both my Beirut allusion and my ten-day absence from this blog. I was writing my second conference paper of the month, and then I was in Venice, drinking Campari and soda. I'll probably never like Campari, even if I drink it while sitting in a Venetian campo watching little Italian boys kick a football against a centuries-old wall. But I liked the Campari-soaked olive that came in the glass, and I liked everything else about Venice, too. Except the fake-designer-purse vendor who shoved me aside while fleeing the police. This was my second time in Venice; my first was the better part of a decade ago, in March 2008. During our spring break from Oxford, my friend Maud and I spent ten days touring Venice, Rome, and Florence, living on smoked mozzarella and hazelnut wafers from the grocery store. In the subsequent six years, I'd often describe our stay in Venice as two of the best days of my life. But after I arrived this time, I realized that I couldn't remembe...

I seriously restricted my beauty spending in March; my only new acquisitions were a Milani liquid lipstick and nail polish (the latter of which set me back a mere $.55); an assortment of NYX products , three of which I'm going to return; and a replacement travel bottle of my favorite moisturizer , from First Aid Beauty. I even went to the FACE Stockholm store in New York and swatched their renowned cream blushes and didn't come home with a single one. I have, at least by my standards, been very, very good. But I do have a wishlist. Of course I do. 1. A peach or coral cream blush. I own only three blushes, all of them powder, and the two I wear regularly are both cool pinks from NARS: Mata Hari and Coeur Battant. In fact, I've worn Mata Hari almost every day since I bought it in February 2013. I always assumed that warm-toned blushes wouldn't suit me, but beauty blogging has made me realize that I might not be the cool-toned ice princess I thought I was. I'm pretty...