I’m now two months into the fall semester, which has been an especially busy one. My mantra for this year is “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and that extends to makeup. (Ironically, it doesn’t extend to this post, which I’ve been tweaking for over a month now.) I’ve had to perfect a… Read More My Five-Minute Teaching Face, Fall 2022
The sad irony of having a full-time job: I now have more disposable income to spend on makeup, but less opportunity to pounce on a much-hyped launch before it sells out. Not that I do that often (or did it often when I was unemployed), mind you. But when ColourPop announced that it was bringing… Read More ColourPop Pressed Powder Blush in Flirt Alert (Valentine’s Day 2022)
When I first got into makeup, in the early 2010s, blush was an afterthought in the Western beauty community. Everyone had a couple of blushes, generally a warm pink and a cool pink, but beauty bloggers often fretted about the prospect of looking tacky or clownish or old-ladyish (never mind the ageism and internalized misogyny… Read More The Great Blush Inventory of 2021
Last summer, I got rid of my Illamasqua cream blush in Zygomatic, one of my all-time favorite beauty products, which I’d bought in the UK in June of 2014. I hadn’t noticed a change in its appearance, smell, or performance, but I felt increasingly uncomfortable smearing a six-year-old cream blush on my face. Unfortunately, Illamasqua… Read More Tower 28 BeachPlease Luminous Tinted Balm in Magic Hour
No, that’s not a typo in the title. I started this post intending to write a list of my favorite new beauty products of 2020, but soon got bogged down in a Carrie Bradshaw-esque question (“I couldn’t help but wonder”): what did it mean for a beauty product to be good, let alone a favorite,… Read More My Ten Most 2020 Beauty Products of 2020
Fenty Beauty, like Rituel de Fille, is a brand that I started following years ago but didn’t get around to trying until 2020. I always liked Fenty’s bold, exuberant aesthetic, but the releases never seemed to line up with my makeup habits. Fenty’s flagship products were an impressively inclusive range of foundation (I don’t wear… Read More Fenty Cheeks Out Freestyle Cream Blush in Strawberry Drip
Rituel de Fille is a brand that I’ve been following, but not actually patronizing, since its launch in 2014. I have a vivid memory of sitting on a bench during a break from my dissertation seminar in Washington, D.C., and scrolling through the newly launched Rituel de Fille website. The brand’s aesthetic seemed designed for… Read More Rituel de Fille Color Nectar Pigment Balm in Bloodflower
Now that I’m winding down my blog, I’ve entered a reminiscing frame of mind. I’ve been thinking about my favorite aspects of the beauty community, one of which is our appreciation for the nuances of color. I’ve always had a good eye for color, but following makeup and beauty for so many years has taught… Read More ColourPop Spring Haul, Part 2: Super Shock Cheek in Aphrodisiac and Super Shock Shadow in Truth
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in central New Jersey for the better part of a decade, it’s how to choose humidity-resistant makeup. (I would say “humidity-proof,” but nothing is truly humidity-proof except mosquitoes.) In a part of the world where the humidity index routinely hovers above 90% and occasionally creeps up to… Read More Making Up with 95% Humidity
For the past few years, I’ve been performing two beauty-related rites of spring. The first rite involves destashing a bunch of lipsticks (more on that soon). The second rite consists of searching for a pinky-red coral lipstick and a lavender blush. Those searches usually end in failure, though for different reasons. There are thousands of… Read More ColourPop Spring 2018 Butterfly Collection, Part 1: Face Duo in Winging It
Auxiliary Beauty 