Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Names: Milani Color Statement Lipstick in Flamingo Pose and Sweet Nectar Date Purchased : Spring 2013 Grade: B Notes: I wish I liked Milani more than I do. It's one of the only cruelty-free American drugstore brands left, and I mean entirely cruelty-free: it hasn't expanded into China or sold out to a larger company that tests on animals (looking at you, NYX ). It has an impressive range of products, colors, and finishes. It occupies a nice mid-to-low price point for a drugstore brand: lower than big international brands like Revlon and Maybelline, but higher than Wet n Wild and e.l.f., whose implausible dirt-cheapness always makes me suspect their quality. In other words, Milani looks great on paper.  (Literally on paper.) In practice, though, the brand is annoyingly hit-and-miss, and nowhere is this clearer than in the Color Statement lipstick line. Milani reformulated the lipsticks last year, added dozens of new shades in six different finishes, and sent a full complement o...

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...

Let's make some popsicles! But before we do, let's travel back in time to the '90s, when AB was a bb. I remember going to the supermarket with my parents and staring at the phrase printed on every tub of ice cream and box of ice pops: "Quiescently Frozen Confection." What did it mean ? It sounded like a magic spell. Then came adulthood, Google, and the reduction of magic to mundane facts. It turns out that "quiescently frozen confection" is a a legal term guaranteeing that a food product contains a certain percentage of milk solids and a certain combination of ingredients. (If you scan the phrase as you would a line of poetry, it's a trio of amphibrachs: short-long-short, short-long-short, short-long-short.) "Quiescent" simply means "stationary," and indicates that the product hasn't been stirred or shaken during the freezing process. But despite knowing all this, I still feel a childish thrill whenever I see the phrase. The ...

Name: MAC Satin Lipstick in Pink Nouveau Date Purchased: Feb. 2013 Grade: A Notes: The end of one series means the resumption of another! It’s time for an installment of my Lipstick Chronology. For the past few months, I’ve been reviewing my lipsticks and lip glosses in the order in which I bought them. I chose the phrase "Lipstick Chronology" in part because it evokes one of my academic interests, the history of time measurement. In the Renaissance, scholars used to compile "wonder cabinets" filled with artifacts from different eras; these cabinets (or, in some cases, whole rooms) served as timelines of a kind, illustrations of the development of human culture. I think of my blog as my own wonder cabinet, a timeline of my approach to beauty. Anyway, I've been thinking about how best to complete my chronology. I still have a lot of lipsticks to get through, so I might end up reviewing some of them in groups (e.g. all five of my Maybelline Vivids in one post). Pi...

Finally! It's humid, guys. I know I've mentioned it before, but when the humidity level is 94% at 7:30 am, I can be forgiven for mentioning it again. I don't understand how those of you who live in hot climates with year-round humidity keep your makeup from sliding off your faces, but I need to get in on whatever black magic you're using. In East Coast summers, the only products that don't melt into nothingness after ten minutes outside are mascara, lipstick, cream eyeshadow, and my newest discovery: cream blush. Cream blush! Where have you been all these years? Thousands of miles away at Illamasqua counters, apparently. (The pristine pan, with a drop of condensation that I dared not brush off for fear of marring the perfect smoothness. But now I can't stop looking at that drop. Damn it!) Illamasqua Cream Blusher in Zygomatic is a blush of many superlatives. It's my first cream blush, of course. It's my first neutral-beige blush. At £21.50, it was by far...

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...

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...