Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Name: Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick in Black Cherry; NYX Round Lipstick in Black Cherry Date of Purchase: Summer 2012 Grades: C+, A- Notes: Why are there so many lipsticks called Black Cherry? Can makeup companies really not come up with another name for a blackened red? As fall 2012 approached, I began searching for a lipstick in a shade I’d often seen Carrie Brownstein wear on Portlandia :   Photo via Wired. When multiple Google searches for “carrie brownstein lipstick” produced nothing of value, I had to come up with my own approximation. I had very specific criteria for my ideal shade of Carrie Brownstein Red. It had to be dark red without skewing too purple or, horrors, too brown. The first lipstick I tried was Revlon Black Cherry, hailed across the blogosphere as the best vampy lipstick ever, a cult classic, a dupe for Tom Ford’s Black Orchid, etc. I can only imagine that a lot of bloggers received monetary compensation from Revlon for saying that, because this lipstic...

 Let's just get it out of the way: this liquid lipstick looks like a vibrator, right? Buying cruelty-free makeup is more difficult than it should be, especially when you're on a budget. Recently, though, I've been making more of an effort to do so. I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons; I feel like a hypocrite when I don't apply the same philosophy to my makeup purchases. When I first started collecting makeup, Revlon was known as the big cruelty-free drugstore brand. I later learned that they were selling in China, which requires third-party animal testing, and my Revlon purchases fell off but did not, alas, stop entirely. The good news is that Revlon is leaving the Chinese market due to poor sales, which means that the company may well regain its cruelty-free status. In the meantime, there is Milani. (Can we take a moment to appreciate that the author of that WSJ article is named Everdeen Mason? Has the writer time-traveled from the inevitable future in which thou...

Name: Revlon Colorburst Lip Butter in Raspberry Pie Date of Purchase: Summer 2012 Grade: B+ Remember the rapturous hype when Revlon released its Lip Butters in late 2011? More moisturizing than a lip balm! More pigmented than a sheer lipstick! Burn all your other lipsticks in a colossal auto-da-fé , these are the only ones you need! I'm always skeptical of such claims, but not as skeptical as I tell myself I am. I bought Tutti Frutti, a sheer jelly orange that turned into a pinky coral on my reddish lips. It was a beautiful color, but everything else was wrong. The formula wasn't moisturizing; worse, it was so soft that it never retracted fully into the tube, and I had to push it down with my finger. Last summer Tutti Frutti melted completely and I had to throw it out, so the first Lip Butter in my chronology is the second one I ever purchased: the berry-fuchsia Raspberry Pie. I've tried five Lip Butters now, and have found that the formula is inconsistent across shades. Ra...

Name: Maybelline Color Sensational Lipstick in Nude Lust Date of Purchase: Jan. 25, 2014 Grade: A- Notes: In the first part of Don Quixote (she began, like a totally normal beauty blogger), Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza meet a group of prisoners sentenced to hard labor. The galley slaves are chained together, which arouses Don Quixote’s sense of injustice. He asks the men about themselves; the most brazen of them, Gin é s de Pasamonte, boasts that he is writing a thrilling autobiography that will surpass every picaresque novel ever published, and that he welcomes his ten-year prison sentence because it will give him a chance to finish his book. Don Quixote asks if the memoir is finished yet. “‘How can it be finished,’ answered Gin é s, ‘when my life isn’t finished yet?’” I find myself in much the same position as Gin é s de Pasamonte. I started my lipstick chronology with the intention of not buying any more lipsticks until I had taken a complete inventory of the...

Name: L'Oreal Colour Riche Lipstick in Fairest Nude Date of Purchase: Summer 2012 Grade: B Notes: A white lady complaining about the dearth of cool-toned nude lipsticks will not, and definitely should not, get much pity. Nonetheless: why are there so few cool-toned nude lipsticks pale enough for me? I'm not even the coolest of cool-toned pale people, yet almost all the nude lipsticks I've tried have pulled too peachy-warm. I've found one exception so far: L'Oreal's Fairest Nude, a gift from my mother, who has been loyal to L'Oreal lipstick since I can remember. It's the perfect color for me: definitely nude instead of MLBB, but with cool mauve undertones. Here it is in all its cheap '80s-tastic glory, next to my other L'Oreal lipstick, True Red: The cool-toned skin of my inner arm makes Fairest Nude look warmer and browner by comparison: But on my face, it's the perfect nude: slightly darker than my skintone, but light and opaque enough to ...

Name: MAC Amplified Creme Lipstick in Up the Amp Date of Purchase: April 2012 Grade: A- Notes: Lots of purple lip colors on the blog recently! Up the Amp was my very first, inspired by tumblr bloggers like Arabelle Sicardi of Powder Doom. In that post, Arabelle is wearing OCC's lip tar in Belladonna, but I decided to edge into the world of purple lipstick with a pinker purple. Then OCC discontinued Belladonna and I never got to try it at all! The lesson here is, don't edge into color. Just wear it. There are many more purple lip colors now than there were in early 2012. The only ones on my radar back then were Belladonna, Illamasqua Kontrol (too blue-gray and gothy for me), and MAC Up the Amp, a cool-toned pinky purple with a bit of gray mixed in:   I ordered Up the Amp sight unseen, and was pleased with what I got, though I'd wanted something a little less muted. Up the Amp wasn't my Platonic purple lipstick, but it was close. That winter, I brought Up the Amp with m...

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...