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
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
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)
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
An especially frivolous post tonight, inspired by Lena’s comment on my review of NARS Angela. I mentioned in the post that Angela was a perfect match for one of my favorite nail polishes, OPI Ate Berries in the Canaries, and Lena wrote, “I used to pair up lippies and polishes and even labeled them, so… Read More Playing Matchmaker
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
Greetings from San Francisco, where I’ve spent the past few days recovering from jetlag and dissertating at neighborhood coffee shops. With three days of the old year remaining, it’s time to post a list I’ve been compiling for the past month or so: my 14 favorite beauty purchases of 2014! A few notes before we… Read More 2014 in Review, Part 2: My 14 Favorite Beauty Purchases
In the last year, my local supermarket has begun stocking the latest OPI and Essie releases, which is both an incentive to go grocery shopping and a severe test of my willpower. I’ve been disenchanted with Essie for a while now, but OPI has impressed me over and over with the quality of its formula… Read More OPI First Class Desires (Holiday 2014) and a Halloween FOTD
Since all but one of the nail polishes I wore in August were new to me, I thought I’d write up a month’s worth of mini-reviews! My first polish of August was Zoya Normani, which I bought at the Birmingham Ulta in July. The darkest shade in Zoya’s nude-based Naturel collection, Normani is a brown-gray-purple… Read More August in Nail Polish
Greetings from Birmingham, Alabama! I’ve been here for a few days to see my boyfriend, who is visiting his parents. This means, of course, that I’ve also been to Ulta. The company has no outposts near where I live, and I have yet to see one in San Francisco, where my parents live, so what… Read More AB Goes to Birmingham (and Ulta)
Auxiliary Beauty 