Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

As you know , I'm going on the academic job market this fall. Accordingly, I'm now interviewing lipsticks for the position of Interview Lipstick. Am I doing this to put off compiling my job materials? Maybe, but there's no denying that first impressions are important. Academia has no set dress code. In fact, most rules in academia are unwritten. You're expected to just know, through intuition or social osmosis, how to structure an article, where to sit during a seminar presentation, and what to wear to an interview. I've encountered competing philosophies re: attire (and re: everything else, for that matter). Some people seem to think that a job candidate should skip makeup and wear an understated outfit in order to let her words do the talking. Others think it's an advantage to wear something that leaves an impression. Personally, I lean toward the second theory. My boyfriend tells me that when one of his advisers interviewed for her current job, she wore a te...

As a preteen and young teenager, I had a brief flirtation with witchcraft. There was something in the air at the time: The Craft had come out several years before, the Harry Potter series was gaining worldwide popularity, and bookstores were full of titles like Spells for Teenage Witches . Growing up in San Francisco made a difference, too. The city was not yet determined to become a sleek, sanitized tech paradise : it was still weird and louche and a little gritty, and you could still buy swaths of moon-printed fabric from hippie ladies at garage sales. I constructed an altar in my bedroom, burned bundles of sage, tried unsuccessfully to make my own rosewater, and meditated while gazing into a candle flame. It was a heady time to be thirteen. Witchcraft made me feel closer to nature and to something more sublime than my middle-school existence. Unfortunately, it also made me feel a little silly. I don't think I'm suited to even the most disorganized of organized religions. Bu...

We're almost a week into August, but do you really care? I don't. 1. MAC Candy Yum-Yum I've had this lipstick for two years and I'm still not sure if it flatters me. How is that possible? I don't even know. I can never predict how I'll feel about it when I put it on: sometimes I'm surprised at how well it suits my coloring, and sometimes I feel so clownish that I have to wipe it off immediately. But every time I start thinking about getting rid of it, I fall in love with it all over again. Candy Yum-Yum has one of the most comfortable yet long-lasting matte formulas I've ever tried, and the stain left when it wears off is almost prettier than the lipstick itself. I surprised myself by reaching for Candy Yum-Yum more often than usual last month. The heat and humidity had reached unbearable levels, and there were very few products that I could trust not to melt off my face during my ten-minute walk to campus. I took to wearing just mascara, highlighter, a...

In the last month or so, I've been pondering the future of this blog. I started Auxiliary Beauty halfway through my fourth year of my PhD program, at a moment when I felt like I might actually be in graduate school forever. I had written one chapter of my dissertation, but the end was nowhere in sight, and nothing seemed more appealing than escaping my academic concerns through beauty writing. It's almost impossible to describe the bizarre state of being a doctoral student in the humanities. It's like having a job, in that you receive money in exchange for work, but neither the salary nor the work seems quite real. Your life settles into a stasis that feels interminable. You have coffee with a friend you see only once or twice a year, someone who decided not to pursue academia, and she tells you about all the dramatic changes that have taken place in her life since you last spoke. In return, the most you can say about yourself is that you finished your Hobbes chapter and s...

Just a quick administrative note: I'm staying for a few days at my grandmother's house in Florida, where the Internet is, as usual, not working (I'm writing this in a Starbucks). I was counting on updating my blog at least a couple of times during this visit, but it looks like my next real post will be from San Francisco later this week. In the meantime, I'll have to content myself with working on my dissertation (which is what I should be doing anyway), wasting my monthly data trying to determine whether I'm actually an INTP and not an INFJ, nursing the sunburn I managed to get on my waist, reading Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker , and wearing the hell out of my awesome new sunglasses: I feel like it's 2007 and I'm updating my LiveJournal, but that's not really a bad feeling. I hope you're all having a not-too-odious Monday.

Greetings from a cramped hotel room on Manhattan's Upper West Side! This endearingly unhip neighborhood is special to me because of the time I spent in a history program at Columbia in the summer before my junior year of college. It was my first experience of New York as an adult (if nineteen counts), and I feel tremendous nostalgia for that summer of awkward dates, Zabar's frozen yogurt eaten on the front steps of brownstones, solo trips to the Museum of Natural History and the Morris-Jumel Mansion , and nerdgasmic encounters with Alexander Hamilton's actual signature holy shit at the New-York Historical Society. Strolling the Upper West Side this week, I had the sensation of meeting my past self (even more of an insufferable bluestocking than my present self, if you can believe it) around every corner . I like revisiting familiar cities more than I like visiting new ones, and part of it must be an egotistical desire to find the bits of myself that I left there last time ...

By ordering Eugenie, a matte plum lipstick from the six-piece MAC x Giambattista Valli collection, I broke four of my cardinal makeup-buying rules: No limited-edition makeup, and especially no limited-edition products from MAC No makeup that I haven't seen in person first No makeup that isn't certified cruelty-free No near-dupes of anything I already have  Now, you may protest — and rightly so — that I've broken all of these rules since starting my blog. Fair enough, but it's rare that I break all of them at once for a single product. So what was it about Eugenie that compelled me to make my first MAC purchase in two years? Well, I mean, look at it. The Giambattista Valli collection comprises five bold matte lipsticks—peach, white-pink, fuchsia, red, and plum—and one sparkly clear gloss in a pot. Each item is named after a woman dear to Valli; Eugenie's namesake is the Greek shipping heiress Eugenie Niarchos. The name means something very different to me: my underg...