Now that exactly half of 2015 is behind us, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the beauty resolutions I made at the end of last year and see how many I managed to keep in the last six months. I can’t actually remember all of them off the top of my head, which… Read More So, How About Those New Year’s Resolutions?
Just call me Virgil. To save some money in the coming school year, I’m moving at the end of the summer into a two-bedroom duplex apartment. As moves go, this one will be almost comically easy, since my new building is next door to my current one. But I’ll be sharing the apartment with a… Read More A Journey Through Purge-atory, Part 1: Lipsticks and Glosses
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
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
Auxiliary Beauty 