Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Last month, NARS shocked many of its customers by announcing that it was expanding into China, whose government requires animal testing on all imported beauty products. Like most successful smaller beauty brands, NARS is already owned by a larger, non-CF brand (Shiseido, in NARS' case), but it has not allowed such testing on its own products since its founding in 1994. Now that's about to change, and quite a few NARS loyalists are upset, including prominent cruelty-free bloggers and YouTubers like Killer Colours  and JKissa . I'm far from a prominent blogger, but I thought I'd take this opportunity to discuss my views on NARS and the larger debate over cruelty-free beauty. NARS x Guy Bourdin, Holiday 2013 ( source ). First, a little about my current stance. If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you'll know that while I strongly favor cruelty-free brands, I'm not exclusively cruelty-free. This accords with my views on meat-eating: I'm mostl...

Needless to say, I wasn't feeling entirely celebratory this Independence Day, but I also wasn't going to miss the chance to wear blue highlighter and metallic red lipstick at the same time. I thought I'd use this FOTD post to write a quick review of a product I bought back in November: ColourPop Lippie Stix in Let's Play, part of last year's ColourPop x Hello Kitty collaboration. Growing up, I owned dozens of Sanrio items: sticker albums, mechanical pencils, stuffed animals, keychains — and, most '90s of all, a red Hello Kitty fanny pack that I still have at my mom's house. I remember chewing Keroppi gum and receiving a set of Pochacco nail polishes for a birthday present. I remember going to FAO Schwarz , the legendary (and now sadly closed) New York toy store, and putting a coin in a giant light-up Hello Kitty that spat out a paper fortune. In other words, there was no way I could let ColourPop's Hello Kitty collection pass me by. To my credit, I limi...

Glossier keeps coming up with new marketing strategies to put me off and new products to tempt me back in. No sooner had I planned a post on Glossier's MLM-esque rep program than they released a fucking birthday-cake-scented lip balm with sparkles and holographic packaging. I have a price, and Glossier knows it. So this post will be a two-parter: a review of Birthday Balm Dotcom, followed by one of my usual rants against the marriage of social media and late capitalism. Who says we can't have our cake and eat it too? *** PART 1: THE REVIEW *** Birthday is Glossier's collaboration with Milk Bar , the dessert arm of the Momofuku restaurant empire. The pairing makes a lot of sense: like Glossier, Milk Bar sells overpriced, overhyped products in small portions, but damned if its aesthetic isn't on point. Here's the "Cereal Milk" soft-serve I had last October in Williamsburg; it was tasty, but who wants soft-serve without a cone? Give me Mister Softee any day...

My boyfriend recently left his job in the UK, which is great news relationship-wise: we met in my former graduate program and have been long-distance since I transferred to my current school seven (!) years ago, and now we'll actually be able to live together for more than a couple months at a time. On a shallower level, however, this will be my last transatlantic makeup review for a while. Before my boyfriend returned to the US earlier this month, I sent him to the Kiko store in the Birmingham train station, where he very kindly swatched a few shades of the Velvet Passion matte lipstick line. (Weirdly, there's another Kiko store five minutes away, in the enormous mall attached to the station.) Here's the full display of the lipsticks, which launched last year. Each one retails for  £ 7 (about $9). The shade I chose was 319 (Chocolate), a medium plummy brown that feels very Jazz-Age-casual to me. The Velvet Passion lipstick bullets have an odd squared-off tip that resemble...

Most makeup collectors have their color kryptonite, particularly when it comes to lipstick: pinky nudes, corals, blue-based reds. For me that color is, and has pretty much always been, magenta. Or whatever you want to call it: bright plum, dark fuchsia, anything that walks the line between purple and deep pink. I just did a lazy Google search for "magenta," and here's the image that comes closest to my Platonic ideal: Magenta isn't a particularly trendy color these days. It evokes 1980s excess, and can read especially '80s if paired with blue or green. For proof, here's my own vintage '80s dress, which I can't wear in public because I'm a somewhat self-respecting adult, but also can't get rid of because look at it : Detail of the pattern: There is something tacky and hedonistic about magenta, but my natal decade was not the only tacky, hedonistic one in history (though it sure came close). In fact, magenta is a nineteenth-century color, a produ...