Since the spring semester is almost over, I thought I’d publish a quick update to the post I made six months ago. I still take about five minutes to do my makeup before classes, but as the weather has warmed up, I’ve gravitated toward different colors and textures while remaining in my cool-toned comfort zone.… Read More My Five-Minute Teaching Face, Spring 2023
Happy spring! It’s been a while. Last summer, I decided to try Urban Decay’s new shiny-but-long-lasting lipstick formula, Vice Lip Bond, which seemed to be along the lines of Revlon Satin Ink and YSL Glossy Stain. Since the lipsticks were $27 each, more than twice the price of Revlon’s perfectly good version, I limited myself… Read More Urban Decay Lip Bond in PDA vs. Lucky Boy Breakfast Burrito
I’m now two months into the fall semester, which has been an especially busy one. My mantra for this year is “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” and that extends to makeup. (Ironically, it doesn’t extend to this post, which I’ve been tweaking for over a month now.) I’ve had to perfect a… Read More My Five-Minute Teaching Face, Fall 2022
Throughout my life, I’ve found that odd-numbered years bring me more change than even-numbered ones, and 2021 was no exception to that rule, for both better and worse. However, one aspect of my life remained the same: I bought a lot of new beauty items, especially makeup. In fact, I bought more new items in… Read More My 12 Favorite Beauty Purchases of 2021
When I first got into makeup, in the early 2010s, blush was an afterthought in the Western beauty community. Everyone had a couple of blushes, generally a warm pink and a cool pink, but beauty bloggers often fretted about the prospect of looking tacky or clownish or old-ladyish (never mind the ageism and internalized misogyny… Read More The Great Blush Inventory of 2021
Product: Urban Decay Wired Vice Lip Chemistry Lasting Glassy Tint in X-Ray Date Purchased: Mar. 1, 2020 Grade: B Let’s take a time machine back to the United States on the first day of March in the year 2020. After a shaky start to his primary campaign, Joe Biden has just emerged as the presumptive… Read More 2020 Lipstick Chronology #4: Urban Decay Lip Chemistry Tint in X-Ray
No, that’s not a typo in the title. I started this post intending to write a list of my favorite new beauty products of 2020, but soon got bogged down in a Carrie Bradshaw-esque question (“I couldn’t help but wonder”): what did it mean for a beauty product to be good, let alone a favorite,… Read More My Ten Most 2020 Beauty Products of 2020
It’s year-end-roundup time once again! I found it harder to compile a best-of list in 2018 than I did in 2017, which suggests that I got better at avoiding impulse buys and zeroing in on products that suited my tastes and needs. (I’ll eventually get around to writing a snarky worst-of-2018 post, but it will… Read More My 15 Favorite Beauty Products of 2018
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in central New Jersey for the better part of a decade, it’s how to choose humidity-resistant makeup. (I would say “humidity-proof,” but nothing is truly humidity-proof except mosquitoes.) In a part of the world where the humidity index routinely hovers above 90% and occasionally creeps up to… Read More Making Up with 95% Humidity
Welcome to my annual roundup of my 15 favorite new-to-me beauty products of the past year! (Here are my lists for 2016, 2015, and 2014.) My 2017 can be summed up in this viral tumblr post: Because I had so little time for blogging in the second half of 2017, this post will double as… Read More My 15 Favorite Beauty Products of 2017
Auxiliary Beauty 