Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

After reviewing Revlon's newish Matte Balm in Fierce, I realized that I hadn't yet seen a comprehensive roundup of the recent changes to the popular Balm Stain, Lacquer Balm, and Matte Balm lines. So I returned to my local CVS today to do some reconnaissance, and here's what I discovered: Revlon is now referring to its Colorburst Balm Stains, Lacquer Balms, and Matte Balms as the "Revlon Crayon Collection." Instead of being separated by finish, the three lipstick ranges are all jumbled together on the shelf and arranged roughly by color instead. There are now ten Matte Balms, eight Balm Stains, and just four Lacquer Balms. That "new shades" boast is hilariously misleading —far more shades have been discontinued than added, and the new additions are all in the Matte Balm line. The current lineup of nudes and pinks (again, these are the Balm Stains, Lacquer Balms, and Matte Balms): L-R: Enchanting, Demure, Elusive, Honey, Cherish, Sweetheart, Showy. The ...

I kept reasonably good tabs on new makeup releases last fall (self-destructively good tabs, even), but there were a few that escaped my notice. One new development was the addition of four shades to Revlon's line of Colorburst Matte Balms. The new colors are Enchanting, a pinkish beige; Fierce, a warm cinnamon brown; Fiery, a reddish berry; and Passionate, a purplish berry. The new additions make sense to me, since the Matte Balm line has always been short on neutral shades, but Revlon also discontinued a few colors to make room for the new ones. Dark purple Shameless and bright orange Audacious are missing from the website , and I've heard that pastel orange Mischievous is gone too, along with a few of the Lacquer Balms (my beloved Coy is safe for now). Though I much prefer brown and berry lipstick to orange, it's always bittersweet to see color trends change. Remember when orange and coral were the trendy lipstick colors? When I first started paying attention to makeup...

I really shouldn't be writing this. I have three other posts in the works: my long-postponed review of Illamasqua Zygomatic blush, my even longer-postponed musings on British vs. American beauty practices, and a contribution to the wave of introspection that has been sweeping the beauty blogosphere in recent weeks. I was all set to write up one of those posts, but yesterday I went and bought a new lipstick, so here we are. When Revlon's Matte Balms first hit the shelves late last year, the only one of the ten shades that caught my eye was Sultry (reviewed here ), a deep roseberry. As a whole, the range was overwhelmingly orange, a color I like better in the abstract than on my face. There was your medium orange, your light orange, your red-orange, your orangey beige; even the fuchsia looked suspiciously tropical. So I enjoyed my Sultry for several months and virtuously ignored the others. But as spring wore on, it occurred to me that I had yet to find a pale orange lipstick. No...

“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...

I've been carrying my tube of Maybelline Vision in Violet all over the Eastern seaboard this weekend, reminding myself repeatedly to return it to CVS. I'm a poor grad student; a $9.50 lipgloss, especially one that I won't wear often, is hard to justify to myself. And yet. It's an opaque blue-toned purple lipgloss! A true purple lip color of any kind is hard enough to find, let alone a lipgloss, let alone from a drugstore brand. So what if it makes me look like a pallid deep-sea creature whom David Attenborough catches gnawing on a whale carcass? And so my stash grows and my checking account dwindles. I've been at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, for the past couple of days, looking at things like this: Just a perfectly preserved first edition of John Donne's Anniversaries from 1612, nbd. Seventeenth-century readers often took it upon themselves to correct errors in the text--here we have "weaving" written in faded red ink (and exqui...