Best Lipstick Formulas 2019

Ugh, you guys. I'm so sorry. You know the drill: some months are busier than others in academia, and until January I'll be very busy indeed. Here are my responsibilities for the next few months: Finish my dissertation (I'm defending in December!) Teach five overcrowded sections of a science-fiction survey course Go on the completely fucked academic job market for the third year in a row Revise and resubmit my third peer-reviewed article Figure out how I'm going to support myself next semester Cook meals, exercise, maintain relationships with other humans As you can imagine, this leaves me with almost no time to blog about beauty. Hell, I barely even have time to  read  about beauty. While I believe that breaks from work are important, blogging is a special case because it's yet another kind of writing. It's very different from academic writing, of course, but it uses the same parts of the brain and demands the same kind of energy, and that energy is finite. Afte...

After three and a half years (!) of beauty blogging, I've learned which panning projects work for me and which are guaranteed to fail. I can usually push myself to finish a piece of makeup if three conditions apply: It's a cream product (usually a lipstick) I like it enough that I've already used up at least 2/3 of it It's getting old and/or is in poor condition I believe that makeup should be a pleasure, so if I actively dislike a product, I'll destash it instead of forcing myself to finish it. If it's newer or in good condition, I'd rather just keep it around and wear it when I feel like it. And if it's almost full, I don't see much point in panning it: that's just setting myself up for frustration. So, as you can imagine, I don't undertake panning projects very often. But I managed to finish two lipsticks (Urban Decay Streak and MAC Up the Amp) earlier this year, and right now I have four more that I think I can pan by the end of 2017. All...

I am not a serial depotter of beauty products. I admire people with a more utilitarian approach to makeup, people for whom packaging means little to nothing. But I'm not one of those people, and I probably never will be. I don't insist on the fanciest, most elaborate compacts and tubes: MAC lipsticks are some of my favorites, design-wise. But I'd rather leave an eyeshadow in its original case, even at the expense of precious shelf space, than depot it into a magnetic palette. There's just too much risk involved in prying makeup out of its exoskeleton, and the end result is often depressingly ugly. That said, there are times when I find depotting necessary. If a product's packaging is damaged to the point that it endangers either the makeup or me, I'd rather depot it than leave it in an unusable shell. When the mirror on my theBalm Nude 'Tude palette developed a huge crack, I reflected that it was probably  a bad idea to have broken glass near a product I pu...

One of the less charming aspects of being an American millennial in 2017 is getting called a "special snowflake" by old bigots on the internet. From my occasional perusal of right-wing Twitter accounts (I discovered last year that my mild-mannered undergrad Shakespeare professor is an alt-right conspiracy theorist, and I'm still not over it), I gather that special-snowflakery consists of wanting a living wage, universal healthcare, Nazi-free public discourse, and a modest decrease in mass shootings. In that spirit, I nominate Topshop Glow Stick in Otherworldly as the official highlighter of millennial special snowflakes, not only because of its color (white as the driven, pre-dog-pee snow) but also because it's as jankily constructed as our government these days. And because Topshop is a British brand and Brexit was the first event that made me wonder if Trump really could become president (though I do think that's a false equivalence in many ways). And because m...

When Urban Decay released the Naked Heat collection earlier this summer, the product that really tempted my resolve was not the Naked Heat palette itself but one of the two limited-edition 24/7 Glide-On Eye Pencils: Torch , a rusty orange. (Okay, the palette was also tempting, but slightly less so.) I swatched both eyeliners, as well as the three Naked Heat lipsticks, at Ulta: Eyeliners: Alkaline (L) and Torch. Lipsticks, top to bottom: Heat, Scorched, Fuel. Photographed in direct sunlight. However, I balked at the idea of paying $20 for an orange eyeliner that I might not wear often. I didn't search actively for dupes, but a week or two later, I came across  this post  by Killer Colours, featuring two of the eyeliners from the NYX Faux Blacks collection. I'd never paid much attention to the Faux Blacks and Faux Whites , but Linda's beautiful looks sparked my interest. I knew I liked the formula of NYX's Slide-On eye pencils, which are obvious (though slightly inferior)...

Though I was skeptical of Urban Decay's decision to pull its entire Revolution lipstick line last year and replace it with the even more extensive Vice line, I've come to appreciate the wisdom of that move. The lipsticks are now $5 cheaper ($17 vs. $22) and 0.6 grams larger (3.4 vs. 2.8); the bullets no longer have the wide, flat tip that made application so challenging; and I haven't noticed an overall dip in formula quality (though I can't say I've swatched all 120 shades). The packaging is lighter, but in my opinion, the functionality has improved: the thinner Revolution lipsticks often wobbled in their tubes, while the Vice lipsticks feel secure. Fine, Urban Decay: I'm a cynical bitch, but you win this one. I now own three Vice lipsticks, one in the Comfort Matte formula (Backtalk, which is apparently the most popular shade) and two in the Metallized formula. My first Metallized lipstick was Roach , a deep bronze from the LE 20th-anniversary collection last ...

Hello from Alabama! I just returned from a weekend that combined several discrete types of awkwardness. There was the mundane "socializing with your significant other's extended family" awkwardness, compounded by the "associating with people far above your own family's socioeconomic bracket, with a totally different lifestyle and set of values" awkwardness, plus some jetlag and Yankee-in-the-South culture shock for good measure. In my boyfriend's words, it was perhaps the most "off-brand" way I could have spent those three days (my brand being, roughly, "soft-goth dirtbag academic"). Let's put it this way: what makeup would you  wear to hang out with immensely rich people who live seven miles inside a gated community that contains two entire golf courses? I'm not sure I came up with a decent answer to this question, but I came up with an  answer (or three), and I might as well record them here for posterity. Let me apologize i...