Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

The past week has been unusually busy, so I haven't had a chance to take photos and write paragraphs and all that. But I've had a series of fugitive beauty-related thoughts, none of them quite substantial enough for an entire post, and I thought I'd compile them here before the wind blew them away. 1. My boyfriend is visiting for the week, and we had an early Valentine's Day tapas outing on February 13 and spent V-Day itself on such thrilling tasks as walking to the grocery store in the snow... ...and making vegetarian chili from this recipe (plus 1.5 tablespoons of cocoa powder, and minus the celery because who puts celery in chili ). I marveled at the alien symmetry of the innards of a bell pepper: 2. My Valentine's Day nail polish was Zoya Gilda, a fuchsia microshimmer that gives an almost foiled effect on the nails. Unfortunately, Gilda is something of a problem polish: it takes a long time to dry completely, it starts chipping within a day or two, and it...

I meant to write this post on New Year's Eve, but I ended up falling asleep at 10:30, because--well, let's pretend it was because I'd partied so mind-blowingly hard before that, and not because I'd had one cocktail at dinner with my mother and one small glass of champagne once we got home. Still, I figure that January 2 is close enough to the beginning of the year for a list of resolutions to seem appropriate. I'm not a very superstitious person in general, but I put a lot of store in end-of-year rituals. I've always loved the feeling of looking ahead to a clean swath of time not yet marred by idiotic decisions, hangovers, and missed deadlines. It's an illusory feeling, but our concept of time is itself illusory, so whatever. I wish I'd been awake to watch 2014 dwindle to nothing. It wasn't a great year for me overall, and it was an even worse year for some of my loved ones, to say nothing of the world at large. But it had some definite bright points...

Happy Independence Day! (I took that photo last year in Chapel Hill, NC. The South loves its fireworks.) Now that I'm writing a dissertation on Renaissance English literature, few people know about my past life as an obsessive American-history nerd. Around the age of sixteen, I decided that I wanted to be a professor of history, specializing in the American Revolution and the early republic (roughly the last third of the eighteenth century). Alexander Hamilton was my particular preoccupation, and on July 11, 2004, the bicentennial of the Hamilton-Burr duel , I performed an elaborate predawn candlelight ritual to commemorate Hamilton's death. No, I didn't have many friends in high school, why do you ask? (It still blows my mind that Burr committed murder while he was Jefferson's vice president, and escaped murder charges in New York and New Jersey by returning to Washington, D.C. to serve out his term. The next year, he began plotting to establish his own empire in the S...

1. A Confession I wrote the first draft of this post last night, under the influence of two of these: Gin, cucumber Dry Soda (which you must try, if you have access to it), and enough fruit/veg garnish that I could pretend, at least for a few seconds, that it was a week from today and I was drinking a Pimm's Cup across the Atlantic. After a few gin-infused strawberries, I seem more charming to myself than I actually am, and my writing tends to suffer accordingly. Lucky for you that I didn't write too much, and that I edited the post this morning, under the less giddy-making influence of a large coffee. 2. A 花見 (Flower-Viewing) This week saw the last meeting of my monthly dissertation seminar in Washington, DC. On my lunch break, I walked around Capitol Hill and took photos of nineteenth-century brickwork and cotton-candy-colored lilacs: And white pom-pom flowers (scientific term, of course): I arrived in Washington a couple of weeks too late for peak cherry-blossom ...