If you distilled all of 2015’s lip-color trends into a single product, you’d come up with Milani Amore Matte Lip Creme in Crush. Crush ticks all the boxes: it’s a dark brown (check) liquid lipstick (check) that dries to a flat matte finish (check). Interestingly, it’s also a marriage of high-end and low-end trends. Matte… Read More Brown Is Back, Bitches: Milani Amore Matte Lip Creme in Crush
My love for k-pop is no secret. And as luck would have it—good or bad luck, you decide— I started this blog mere weeks before I fell down the k-pop rabbit hole. Many of us can blame Kate of Drivel about Frivol for one obsession or another; for me, that obsession was k-pop, which I’d… Read More K-Pop Makeup: The Products
As you know, I’m going on the academic job market for the first time this fall. Accordingly, I’m now interviewing lipsticks for the position of Interview Lipstick. Am I doing this to put off compiling my job materials? Maybe, but there’s no denying that first impressions are important. Academia has no set dress code. In… Read More Professionalesque, Part 2: Urban Decay Rapture
As a preteen and young teenager, I had a brief flirtation with witchcraft. There was something in the air at the time: The Craft had come out several years before, the Harry Potter series was gaining worldwide popularity, and bookstores were full of titles like Spells for Teenage Witches. Growing up in San Francisco made… Read More In Search of Lost Witchcraft: NYX Simply Vamp Lip Cream in Enamored
We’re almost a week into August, but do you really care? I don’t. 1. MAC Candy Yum-Yum I’ve had this lipstick for two years and I’m still not sure if it flatters me. How is that possible? I don’t even know. I can never predict how I’ll feel about it when I put it on:… Read More July Favorites (Beauty and Otherwise)
In the last month or so, I’ve been pondering the future of this blog. I started Auxiliary Beauty halfway through my fourth year of my PhD program, at a moment when I felt like I might actually be in graduate school forever. I had written one chapter of my dissertation, but the end was nowhere… Read More FOTD: Professionalesque
Greetings from a cramped hotel room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side! This endearingly unhip neighborhood is special to me because of the time I spent in a history program at Columbia in the summer before my junior year of college. It was my first experience of New York as an adult (if nineteen counts), and… Read More A Journey Through Purge-atory, Part 2: Eyeshadows and One More Lipstick
By ordering Eugenie, a matte plum lipstick from the six-piece MAC x Giambattista Valli collection, I broke four of my cardinal makeup-buying rules: No limited-edition makeup, and especially no limited-edition products from MAC No makeup that I haven’t seen in person first No makeup that isn’t certified cruelty-free No near-dupes of anything I already have… Read More I Have a Plum Problem: MAC x Giambattista Valli Eugenie
Name: Revlon Lip Butter in Candy Apple Date Purchased: November 2013 Grade: A Notes: After my last post, which took me forever to write, I thought I’d clear my palate with a quick installment of my Lipstick Chronology, now approaching its end: this is the penultimate post! I started my blog in early 2014, so… Read More Lipstick Chronology #34: Revlon Candy Apple
Welcome to another installment of my not-actually-monthly compilation of monthly favorites! Some bloggers use favorites posts to spotlight new purchases, but I prefer to feature older favorites as well as non-makeup discoveries. Let’s begin with my main makeup fixation in June: 1. Purple Lipstick Purple has been my favorite lip color since I started wearing… Read More June Favorites (Beauty and Otherwise)
Auxiliary Beauty 