Auxiliary Beauty turned one today!

I don’t have any especially attractive baked goods lying around, so here’s one of the peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies I made earlier this week.

I didn’t start blogging regularly until February 2014, but my introductory post went up on January 18. Maintaining this blog has been one of the best parts of the past year: I’ve loved interacting with my readers, developing my makeup skills, and having a place to do some non-academic writing. Since I’m always fascinated when other bloggers reveal which of their posts have been the most popular, I thought I’d do the same in honor of my first anniversary. Below, the five posts that have received the most pageviews over the past year:

1. NARS Audacious Lipstick Swatches and the Allure of Audrey

Liv, Audrey, Grace, Vera, Annabella, Fanny, and Bette.

This post got about five times as many views as the second most popular post. The release of the Audacious lipsticks for NARS’ 20th anniversary unleashed an online frenzy, the sort of frenzy that François Nars himself couldn’t have anticipated back in 1994. I’ve looked up my share of Audacious reviews and swatches myself, so I understand the appeal of this post. There are just so damn many lipsticks in the line, with so many variations on berry and bubblegum pink and coral. You want someone to rank the half-dozen orange-reds from warm to cool so you don’t have to do it yourself, you know?

For the record, I still haven’t bought a lipstick from this range. The more swatches I examine, the more paralyzed I feel; the more paralyzed I feel, the more research I do. It’s precisely this feedback loop that got me the pageviews, no doubt. Also, someone linked to my blog on a Polish beauty forum. I actually ran the post through Google Translate to see if the posters were saying something like “Can you believe this bitch and her half-assed swatching?” Thankfully, the discussion was all business (that is, lipstick).

2. Beauty Abroad, Part 13: Topshop Matte Lip Bullet in Get Me Bodied

When I bought Get Me Bodied, I had no idea that the Matte Lip Bullets were new for fall 2014; but apparently they were, which I think explains the popularity of this post. I can still find them online, so I have hope that they’re not limited edition–I’d love to try more colors when I go back to the UK. Get Me Bodied was one of my favorite purchases from 2014, so I hope my review persuaded other people to try it, too!

3. NYX Reviews, Part 1: The Bad

WHAT IS THIS SHIT.

This set of reviews also featured a new product: NYX’s reformulated Hot Singles eyeshadows. (I’m sensing a pattern here.) I think people might also enjoy negative reviews, since my post about my least favorite purchases of 2014 received many more hits than my post about my favorites. I do appreciate a good snarky review myself, and they’re getting hard to find in the increasingly monetized world of beauty blogging, so I’ll endeavor to keep bringing the snark in 2015. Though, ideally, my purchases will be so wise and well-thought-out that I’ll have no reason to do so!

4. Lipstick Chronology #7: MAC Capricious

This was one of my very first posts, and I’m a little embarrassed that it’s my fourth most viewed, since the photos aren’t great quality; I also have no idea what my hair is doing there. Incidentally, I took out my tube of Capricious yesterday and discovered that the lipstick had gone moldy after three and a half years of faithful service. A fitting end, perhaps, to my first year of blogging. Wishing to prevent such a tragedy from happening again, I sterilized my entire lipstick collection with paper towels and a bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol, producing this unexpectedly artistic mess:

5. Lipstick Chronology #28: MAC Candy Yum-Yum, Maybelline Fuchsia Flash, and a Word about Dupes

People really love MAC lipsticks. This was the most introspective post of my top five–I blathered on for a few paragraphs about my objections to the practice of dupe-hunting–but I suspect that most readers showed up for the Candy Yum-Yum swatches and comparisons, not the navel-gazing.

I also thought about making a list of my most unpopular posts, but there wouldn’t have been much use in that. It took a while for people to start reading my blog, so the posts with the fewest views are simply the ones I wrote earliest. But I will say that in general, my posts about nail polish receive relatively few hits. This makes me wonder if makeup blogs and nail blogs just have different audiences. They probably do, if my own behavior is any indication: I’ll check out a few nail blogs if I’m looking for swatches of specific polishes, but there are none that I read regularly. Is this the case for anyone else?

I feel like I’ve done a couple of self-congratulatory stock-taking posts in the last few months, so I’ll keep this one brief. Thank you so much for taking the time to read my blog and comment over the past year! I’m excited to find out what year two of beauty blogging will bring.