About Me

Welcome! I’m Zoe, a writer, educator, and owner of too many lipsticks. I grew up in San Francisco and now live in Philadelphia.

When I was younger and significantly more foolish, I got a Ph.D. in early modern English literature. In 2014, midway through my doctoral program, I started Auxiliary Beauty as an outlet for my extracurricular musings on makeup. My blog contains product reviews, discussions of cosmetic history and beauty marketing, and self-indulgent introspection, sometimes all in the same post.

The name of my blog is a seventeenth-century slang term for cosmetics. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, a compendium of London thieves’ slang from 1699, defines “Auxiliary-beauty” as “Dress, Paint, Patches, Setting of Eye-brows, and licking the Lipps with Red.” Fair warning, however: I draw more beauty inspiration from k-pop and the 1980s than I do from the early modern period.

It pains me to even have to say this, but I fucking hate generative AI and will never use it in any of my writing. That’s a promise.

I do not work with brands or accept PR in exchange for reviews. All of the products I review on my blog are purchased with my own money unless otherwise noted.

You can leave me a tip here: https://ko-fi.com/auxiliary_beauty. Thank you for your support!