Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

"A Journey Through Purge-atory" is my ongoing, if not exactly regular, destashing series; here are my first and second posts. Today, let's get rid of some lipstick and polish! Lipsticks, left to right: YSL Glossy Stain in Rouge Gouache, Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Mauvy Night, Revlon Colorstay Ultimate Suede Lipstick in Supermodel, Maybelline Colorsensational Vivids in On Fire Red, Milani Amore Matte Lip Creme in Crush. YSL Rouge Gouache is three years old now, and the formula seems a little off: it's thicker than it used to be and it doesn't quite set on my lips. We had some good times together, Rouge Gouache, but I didn't wear you enough while you were still in decent condition, because it turns out that I like opaque glosses only in theory. Revlon Mauvy Night is one of my oldest lipsticks: I bought it in the summer of 2011 after seeing Midnight in Paris and falling in love with Marion Cotillard's dusky lip color. I did not, however, fall in lo...

Back in November , I decided to participate in Project Make-a-Dent, the creation of Helen at Lola's Secret Beauty Blog . Quite a few people on my blogroll have joined in this project, which aims to curb excessive consumption by forcing us to pay attention to the products we already own. The idea is to choose a handful of makeup or skincare products we've been neglecting, then either use them up or "make a dent" in them. Since I have more lipsticks than any other kind of makeup, I chose seven that struck me as suitable for fall and winter. Here's the photo I took originally: Left to right: Rimmel Apocalips Lip Lacquer in Across the Universe, Revlon Plum Velour, NYX Perfect, Revlon Matte Balm in Sultry, Revlon Fire and Ice, Revlon Cherries in the Snow, and YSL Glossy Stain in Rouge Gouache. Now that two and a half months have passed, it's high time I updated you on my progress--except that I haven't made much progress at all. Instead, I've achieved som...

We makeup fiends are a fickle bunch, hailing a product as a holy grail one week and forgetting about it the next. I slip in and out of lipstick infatuations as regularly as I once slipped in and out of professor crushes, but at least professor crushes are free. Lipstick is not, and right now, my friends, I'm pretty broke. I haven't bought a lipstick in a month, and I want to maintain that discipline until the end of the year. What better time to shine a spotlight on some of the lip colors I've neglected recently? I own at least sixty, but I end up playing favorites each season. To break my recent patterns, I've decided to take part in Project Make-a-Dent , the brainchild of Helen at Lola's Secret Beauty Blog . The rules are simple: commit to using a handful of products more often, then do so. The goal is to either use up or make a dent in beauty products that have slipped out of your field of view. For my version of Make-a-Dent, I focused on lipsticks, since I have ...

Name: YSL Rouge Pur Couture Vernis à Lèvres Glossy Stain #11 (Rouge Gouache) (TL;DR) Date Purchased: November 2012 Grade: A Notes: This, my friends, is the business. This is my favorite red of all time . It's not the most wearable or versatile or low-maintenance red, but I still feel that thrill of shiny newness every time I put it on, even though I bought it a year and a half ago. I mean, look at it: (It also plays well with NARS Lhasa , but everything does.) Back in late 2012, millennia ago in makeup years, the YSL Glossy Stains were truly revolutionary. Since then, of course, they've spawned both drugstore and high-end imitations and made us all comfortable with the idea of a hybrid lip product. The gimmick of the Glossy Stains, as if anyone doesn't already know by now, is that they're meant to have the lasting power of a stain, the pigmentation of a lipstick, and the shine of a gloss. Check, check, and check. They're also supposed to be moisturizing, or at leas...

Name: YSL Rouge Pur Couture #8 (Belle de Rose) Date of Purchase: Fall 2012 Grade: A Notes: Of all the YSL lip colors in existence, Belle de Rose must be one of the least swatched and blogged about, despite its starring role in this Lisa Eldridge video . I suspect that YSL's flurry of new releases--Rouge Volupt é , Rouge Volupt é Shine, Glossy Stains, Gloss Volupt é --have distracted consumers from the original Rouge Pur Couture lipstick line. In fact, I forget how I first heard about Belle de Rose, though I remember that I'd been looking for a dark fuchsia lip color for a while. When I came across the one or two online swatches of Belle de Rose, my mind was made up. I promised myself that I'd order it as a reward for passing my general exam, but it somehow became a pre-generals reward instead. (It wasn’t just generals that induced me to buy Belle de Rose. It was also that the name evoked my livejournal handle of yesteryear: “belledezuylen,” after James Boswell’s literary...

Name: Revlon Colorburst Lipstick in Fuchsia   Date of Purchase: May 2011 Grade: A Notes: Just over a year ago, I went into town for some post-Thanksgiving shopping. I was wearing one of my first high-end beauty purchases: YSL Glossy Stain in Rouge Gouache, a bright pink-based red. A middle-aged saleswoman with a Jersey accent complimented me on my lip color and complained about the difficulty of finding the perfect red lipstick. “In magazines, you read, ‘If you have yellow undertones…’” she said. “I don’t know from yellow undertones!” Beauty bloggers love talking about being “warm-toned” or “cool-toned,” but the fact is that all of us have a mixture of warm and cool undertones. There are innumerable tricks that will supposedly tell you whether you’re warm or cool: holding silver and gold up to your face, figuring out whether your veins look blue or green. But I think it’s more instinctive than that. If you’ve shopped around for lipsticks, you’ve probably had the experience ...