Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Glossier keeps coming up with new marketing strategies to put me off and new products to tempt me back in. No sooner had I planned a post on Glossier's MLM-esque rep program than they released a fucking birthday-cake-scented lip balm with sparkles and holographic packaging. I have a price, and Glossier knows it. So this post will be a two-parter: a review of Birthday Balm Dotcom, followed by one of my usual rants against the marriage of social media and late capitalism. Who says we can't have our cake and eat it too? *** PART 1: THE REVIEW *** Birthday is Glossier's collaboration with Milk Bar , the dessert arm of the Momofuku restaurant empire. The pairing makes a lot of sense: like Glossier, Milk Bar sells overpriced, overhyped products in small portions, but damned if its aesthetic isn't on point. Here's the "Cereal Milk" soft-serve I had last October in Williamsburg; it was tasty, but who wants soft-serve without a cone? Give me Mister Softee any day...

Yesterday I came across a very insightful post on r/MakeupRehab, titled "A thought on the fakeness of Instagram..." It's a long post, so I won't quote it in full, but the writer argues that successful Instagrammers like her sister, women whose posts feature them "in trendy places in even trendier outfits," perpetuate an internalized misogyny that filters down to the social-media accounts of ordinary women: It's so absolutely drilled in our heads that we have to be PERFECT at all times. On social media, we never post when we get dumped. We never show ourselves when we splurge on makeup because we had a bad day. We never show when we fail that exam, or have a fight with our partners, or are so depressed we can't leave bed. We never show ourselves eating that third bag of cheetos on the couch. We never show when we fail. And we never show ourselves listening to our favorite songs or holding our loved ones or laughing with a friend and feeling something...

Since joining Instagram two months ago, I've become more aware than ever of the sheer number of beauty blogs out there. It seems like every other woman on Instagram identifies herself in her profile as a beauty blogger. The #bbloggers tag accrues hundreds of new posts per minute (granted, some of these are spammers misusing the tag to draw attention to themselves, but hey). I used to worry that blogging was a dying art, but now I'm not so sure. What I am fairly sure of, though, is that many people are getting into blogging for the wrong reasons, or going about it in a misguided way. They need some advice. Do they need my advice, specifically? Maybe not, but I'm going to offer it anyway, because that's the sort of person I am. I've held off from making this post for fear of coming off as a pompous windbag, but given that I'm training to be a full-time pompous windbag (i.e. academic), why should I hesitate? So, without further ado, some dos and don'ts of bea...

I've been on Instagram for three weeks now, and it's brought me a lot of delight so far. I love posting snippets of my life and getting glimpses into other people's travels, lunches, and lipstick hauls. I also know that not everyone takes the same approach to Instagram that I do. Some people use it primarily to sell a product or promote a business, which is fine by me: I wasn't surprised to discover that Instagram was as commercialized as any other social-media site. What did surprise me, though, was the very hazy line between personal and professional accounts--but no, "professional" isn't the right word. I'm talking about this sort of thing: All right, we can agree that this is probably a bot. But what about the person, or entity, leaving this comment on multiple people's accounts? Surely just another spambot, right? No, actually. Further investigation revealed that the account belonged to a real person who had fallen for someone else's sche...

Auxiliary Beauty turned one today! I don't have any especially attractive baked goods lying around, so here's one of the peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies I made earlier this week. I didn't start blogging regularly until February 2014, but my introductory post went up on January 18. Maintaining this blog has been one of the best parts of the past year: I've loved interacting with my readers, developing my makeup skills, and having a place to do some non-academic writing. Since I'm always fascinated when other bloggers reveal which of their posts have been the most popular, I thought I'd do the same in honor of my first anniversary. Below, the five posts that have received the most pageviews over the past year: 1. NARS Audacious Lipstick Swatches and the Allure of Audrey Liv, Audrey, Grace, Vera, Annabella, Fanny, and Bette. This post got about five times as many views as the second most popular post. The release of the Audacious lipsticks for NARS' 20th...

One lazy evening last year, I was reading an online forum devoted to snarking on beauty bloggers and YouTube gurus: know thy frenemy and all that. As someone who studies satire for a living, I have nothing against anonymous snark forums, at least in principle. Bloggers like to profess shock that such websites even exist—imagine, a place where nameless, faceless people can talk shit about other people!—as if anonymous snark hasn't played a role in public discourse since Martin Marprelate . Granted, I might feel less charitable if I'd ever been mocked on one of these forums. But I'd like to believe that even if I were, I'd be able to distinguish between sound criticism and malicious nitpicking, rolling my eyes at the latter and taking the former to heart. As I commented on Larie's excellent post on her resolution to "stop being a hater," the Internet encourages both excessive niceness and excessive meanness, creating a climate in which constructive criticis...

Well, that's one thing I have no trouble providing. The beauty blogosphere has taken a turn for the introspective in recent months, with some of my favorite bloggers questioning how and why they write about makeup and beauty. Before I say anything else, I want to stress how lucky I feel to belong to such a thoughtful, intelligent online community. When I first started reading beauty blogs a few years ago, I was struck by how good a lot of them were: how well-written, funny, analytical, and just plain smart. I started my own blog because I wanted to contribute to the discussion, and maybe even entertain some of you as much as you'd entertained me. (Plus, none of my real-life friends are makeup geeks, and I didn't want to bore them discussing the minutiae of blush textures and lipstick finishes.) Four or five months on, I'm still in the honeymoon period of blogging. I get excited every time someone leaves a comment, and I can hardly believe that none of those comments ha...