Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Today marks the end of my two-month beauty no-buy, which I've discussed here and here . The terms of my no-buy were fairly lenient: I was allowed to replace skincare, haircare, and "boring" products like mascara and concealer, and I could accept (and request) gifts, but I couldn't buy any new makeup or nail polish. I'm proud to say that I never broke the no-buy, though I picked up a few more sheet masks than I might have otherwise, and I received three beauty products as gifts: from my boyfriend, Urban Decay's Naked2 Basics palette and Topshop's mini Lip Bullet in Motel , and from my mom, a bottle of Essie Summit of Style. I went on the no-buy for a few reasons. First, to save money: I'm a grad student who earns barely enough to cover rent and food, and I don't have enough discretionary income to buy new makeup constantly. Second, to prevent my collection from getting overwhelmingly large: I want to use and appreciate everything I have, and get ri...

As I've mentioned before , k-pop is a visual genre as much as it is a musical one, and makeup is a crucial part of its visual impact. In this post, I've rounded up my favorite looks from k-pop music videos released this year, as well as some quick honorable mentions. If you're as tired as I am of hearing about Adele's contouring game in the "Hello" video, read on and get some new celebrity inspiration! I've listed the videos not in order of preference but in the order they were released this year. However, several of my favorite songs from 2015 have ended up on this list, which makes sense: if I hate a song, I'm not inclined to watch the video more than once, and a single viewing doesn't usually allow me to take note of interesting makeup. 1. Nine Muses, "Drama" Every k-pop comeback is an elaborate affair: the eager public gets a slew of teaser images and videos before the actual music video ever drops. Nine Muses hyped their January come...

Despite my no-buy, I've somehow managed to acquire a new lipstick. My boyfriend teaches in the UK and asked me if I wanted him to bring me anything when he came to visit this month. He was actually the one who suggested that he might surprise me with some makeup from Topshop, and who was I to say no? I told him that I liked the Lip Bullets and asked him to pick one out, and he obliged with a mini version of Motel, a warm light brown, packaged in a pyramid-shaped holiday ornament. I'd actually been looking at Motel online, so I was very excited to try it out. In all its ornamental glory (and yes, that's a hot-pink daruma ). If only I had a tree to hang it on... When I finally brought myself (after five days!) to wrestle the lipstick out of its pyramid, the cap popped off and the bullet got nicked. So if you find yourself in possession of one of these, maybe try not to be a clumsy ass. Here's Motel next to a full-sized Lip Bullet: This would make it appear that the mini ...

Odds are good that if you're reading this, you fall into one of two categories: either you've already collected the 2015 Sephora birthday gift, or you don't have access to Sephora and are annoyed to see the millionth review of the 2015 Sephora birthday gift pop up on your feed. In fact, I'm tempted to skip the review entirely and instead give you a detailed account of a dream I had last night, in which the entire city of Rome was disintegrating due to various apocalyptic circumstances and I had to enlist the financial backing of Big Bang's TOP (a noted patron of the arts ) to rescue Rome's most important cultural artifacts and house them in a colossal climate-change-proof building. But this blog is also a personal makeup diary, a chance for me to record my purchases and my impressions of them, so I suppose I'll continue with the review (after all, it will be even more useless in 2016). You probably don't want an exhaustive tour of my subconscious, anyway...

"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...