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
Name: Revlon Lip Butter in Candy Apple Date Purchased: November 2013 Grade: A Notes: After my last post, which took me forever to write, I thought I’d clear my palate with a quick installment of my Lipstick Chronology, now approaching its end: this is the penultimate post! I started my blog in early 2014, so… Read More Lipstick Chronology #34: Revlon Candy Apple
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
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
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
Well, I guess that was an eight-day hiatus! It crept up on me, as such things do. First the weather was gloomy for days on end, so I couldn’t take decent photos. Then I took an overnight trip to visit a friend in another city. Then I spent a couple of days in DC for… Read More 2014 in Review, Part 1: My 14 Most Disappointing Beauty Purchases
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
I was planning to wait until spring to buy these two bright pinks, but I had a $7-off-$17 coupon for Revlon burning a hole in my wallet, and there were no other Revlon products I really wanted. So here we are: my first Moisture Stain, Barcelona Nights, and my sixth Lip Butter, Lollipop. (Seventh, if… Read More Pinks for Winter: Revlon Moisture Stain in Barcelona Nights and Lip Butter in Lollipop
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
I have dry lips. Like, really dry. No matter the weather, no matter the season, there’s always a possibility that I’ll wake up with my lower lip chapped or cracked or even bleeding. This has been the state of things for as long as I can remember, and I have yet to find a solution… Read More The Best Lipstick Formulas for Chronically Dry Lips
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