October has always been my favorite month. As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, my love of seasonal makeup has a lot to do with my upbringing. My parents and I lived in Cambridge, MA, until I was seven, when we moved to San Francisco. I spent the next ten years pining for “real seasons,” especially… Read More FOTD: Autumn Leaves
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
Early this month, just after returning from England, I started my summer job in the university archives. These archives house documents related to the history of the university, over a century’s worth of senior theses, and the lifelong correspondence of some prominent alumni. My job for the summer is to reprocess the papers of one… Read More FOTDs: From the Archives
I’ve been thinking recently about the so-called “effortless” look, but I’ve also been thinking about its opposite, or perhaps its obverse: the heavy, colorful, ombréd look popular on Instagram, Tumblr, and YouTube. At first I thought these two looks couldn’t be further apart aesthetically, but I’ve come to believe that they’re actually two sides of… Read More Selfie-Consciousness: Some Thoughts on Instagram Beauty
As a beauty blogger, I often feel that I should be experimenting constantly with makeup, and that wearing the same lipstick two days in a row is tantamount to a creative slump, especially if that lipstick is a neutral shade. Since buying Milani’s Matte Naked lipstick, I’ve worn it almost every other day, though nude… Read More FOTDs: My Makeup Is So Boring, Guys
It occurs to me that “Feels Like Negative Thirteen” would have been a great name for an early-’00s pop-punk emo band. What it is not, however, is a phrase I want to read on weather.com just before I walk to the library in the morning. Anyway, this is a quick addendum to yesterday’s review of… Read More FOTD: Feels Like Negative Thirteen (feat. ColourPop Bill)
I meant to write this post on New Year’s Eve, but I ended up falling asleep at 10:30, because–well, let’s pretend it was because I’d partied so mind-blowingly hard before that, and not because I’d had one cocktail at dinner with my mother and one small glass of champagne once we got home. Still, I… Read More 2014 in Review, Part 3: Beauty Resolutions for 2015
Yes, I know it’s Tuesday (Wednesday, in some time zones), but I wore this makeup yesterday. Deal with it. Last week, Pantone revealed its color of the year for 2015: Marsala, a soft plummy brown. Pantone’s color of the year is supposed to predict trends in fashion, makeup, and interior design, though these days it… Read More FOTD: Marsala Monday
In the last year, I’ve become obsessed with an aesthetic that I like to call “Edwardian cyborg”: futuristic sleekness coupled with windswept Gibson-girl glamour. This is the image that started it all: You’ve already seen this photo in an earlier post, wherein I experimented with theBalm’s Nude ‘Tude palette. “Edwardian cyborg” was the name… Read More FOTD: Toward an Ethnography of the Edwardian Cyborg
Toiling in the knowledge mines, one occasionally comes upon some fascinating gems. Or, more prosaically: I typed the phrase “auxiliary beauty” into Early English Books Online to see what would pop up. For those of you who aren’t pursuing graduate degrees in early modern literature, EEBO is a database containing almost every work printed in… Read More FOTD: A Discourse of Auxiliary Beauty, or Artificial Handsomeness
Auxiliary Beauty 