In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been a bad early modernist: I’ve watched the BBC miniseries of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall without first reading the books. I did start reading Wolf Hall two years ago, but I just couldn’t get into it, despite my childhood obsession with Tudor history. There’s something about grad school… Read More Beauty Abroad, Part 15: Inglot Eyeshadows in 08 and 433
Many thanks to everyone who gave me Canadian beauty advice! As it turned out, I bought three beauty items in Toronto, none of them from a Canadian company: an American Apparel nail polish, a Face Shop sheet mask, and an Inglot custom eyeshadow duo. I almost never wear glitter topcoats, but I made a (possibly… Read More Beauty Abroad, Part 14: Notes from Toronto
How’s that for a convoluted title? Anyway, I’m going to Toronto for the first time at the end of this week! I’ll be presenting at a conference and will be in the city for a mere 48 hours, so I won’t have much time for sightseeing (though I have a couple of meals planned with… Read More AB Goes to Toronto (What I’m Bringing + What Should I Do/Buy?)
Until recently, teal was one of my least favorite colors. It unsettled me in the same way that fuchsia used to: both are amphibious, ill-defined colors. But one swipe of fuchsia lipstick in the summer of 2011 banished my unease forever, and I’ve just experienced a similar conversion to teal. It started when I looked… Read More Let Us Now Praise Formula X Enigma
(I typed “Spring 2013” at first, then spent a few seconds wondering why that didn’t look right.) Not quite five months since my last empties post, I’ve accumulated another small collection of used-up products: Herewith, some mini-reviews, in no particular order: CoverGirl LashBlast Length Mascara There’s a reason why I never write posts about mascara:… Read More Empties and Near-Empties, Spring 2015
Just a quick review of the final two items from last month’s Ulta order: NYX Slim Lip Pencils in Dolly Pink, a pastel lavender-pink, and Pumpkin, a burnt orange with gold shimmer. I keep protesting on this blog that I don’t care much for lip liner, but I also keep buying more lip liners. I… Read More Liner Notes: NYX Slim Lip Pencils in Dolly Pink and Pumpkin
I made my stage debut at the age of eight, in my elementary school’s production of The Phantom Tollbooth. I had two roles: the Spelling Bee (marred by a wardrobe malfunction: part of my headband fell off and I pouted for the rest of the scene) and the Senses Taker. For the second role, I… Read More Eight Beauty Products I Didn’t Buy in the Last Six Months
Before starting this post, I spent a long time five minutes trying to come up with a good simile for the operation of material desire online. The Internet engenders small cravings, then quickly magnifies those cravings until you can’t imagine a time when you didn’t want X nail polish or Y lipstick, even if you… Read More So Vernal It Hurts: Butter London Fruit Machine and Trout Pout
I’m not currently abroad, but this lipstick came from abroad, so I’m going to slide it into the “beauty abroad” tag and hope the gods of blogging consistency don’t strike me down. When I bought Topshop’s Matte Lip Bullet in Get Me Bodied last September, I noticed a few other colors in the Matte Lip… Read More Beauty Abroad, Part 14: Topshop Matte Lip Bullet in Plastique
This March has felt about twice as long as a normal month, and it’s still not over. I can’t explain what made it seem so interminable. Maybe it was that we were teased repeatedly with the promise of spring, yet the vernal equinox nine days ago brought us this: Whatever the reason, this was a… Read More March Favorites (Beauty and Otherwise)
Auxiliary Beauty 