In my twenty-seven years on this earth, I’ve never lived in a space larger than a two-bedroom apartment. My current apartment measures 271 square feet (10 square feet per year of life, plus one to grow on), which is actually an upgrade in size from my previous place. It’s fair to say that I’m used… Read More By Request: When Minimalism Isn’t a Choice
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
In the last few years, I’ve noticed two different beauty ideals emerging on the Internet, or at least in the corners of the Internet that I frequent. The first is “effortless beauty”: glowing skin, almost no color makeup, and an overall air of having something better to do. The second is what we might call… Read More Should Beauty Be Effortless?
The past week has been unusually busy, so I haven’t had a chance to take photos and write paragraphs and all that. But I’ve had a series of fugitive beauty-related thoughts, none of them quite substantial enough for an entire post, and I thought I’d compile them here before the wind blew them away. 1.… Read More Scattered Words for a Windy Sunday
Back in November, I decided to participate in Project Make-a-Dent, the creation of Helen at Lola’s Secret Beauty Blog. Quite a few people on my blogroll have joined in this project, which aims to curb excessive consumption by forcing us to pay attention to the products we already own. The idea is to choose a… Read More Why I Failed to Make a Dent
Auxiliary Beauty turned one today! I don’t have any especially attractive baked goods lying around, so here’s one of the peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies I made earlier this week. I didn’t start blogging regularly until February 2014, but my introductory post went up on January 18. Maintaining this blog has been one of the best parts of… Read More Happy Unbirthday to Me
One lazy evening last year, I was reading an online forum devoted to snarking on beauty bloggers and YouTube gurus: know thy frenemy and all that. As someone who studies satire for a living, I have nothing against anonymous snark forums, at least in principle. Bloggers like to profess shock that such websites even exist—imagine,… Read More On Being an "Old-Fashioned" Blogger
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
Names: Maybelline Color Sensational Vivid Lipstick in Fuchsia Flash, MAC Matte Lipstick in Candy Yum-Yum Dates Purchased: March 2013, August 2013 Grades: A, A Notes: You may wonder why, given my devotion to seasonal makeup colors, I’m reviewing two of the most stubbornly summery lipsticks in my stash. Let’s just say that I’m even more… Read More Lipstick Chronology #28: MAC Candy Yum-Yum, Maybelline Fuchsia Flash, and a Word about Dupes
In the summer of last year, while browsing the venerable Bookshop in Chapel Hill, NC, I made a curious find. Published in 1996, long before “basic” became an insult, Cindy Crawford’s Basic Face is a “makeup workbook” co-authored by Crawford, the makeup artist Sonia Kashuk, and Kathleen Boyes. “What’s a basic face? A five-minute confidence… Read More Lipstick Chronology #27: Back to 1996 with Cindy Crawford’s Basic Face
Auxiliary Beauty 