Nail cutter category disruptor EDJY is now shaking up the tweezer market! The brand adopts an engineering approach to beauty tools and now, your brows will be better for it! If you started handling your own tweezing during (and post) COVID, you can continue to shape your brows with surgical precision with EDJY’s tweezers, which allow for control, and therefore, accuracy and ease. Thanks to aligned tips, laser-etched grip pads, and hard steel materials, you’ll be able to get a better grab of hairs and pull less, meaning less pain and pulling, and less damage to your skin! I thread my brows every two weeks, but I do deal with errant brow and chin and even nose (!!!) hairs, so I’ve been using my EDJYs to gently remove, rather than yank the offending hairs out of my skin! But if you self-tweeze, you can maintain your arched and shaped brows with this tool.
MAC is the OG, IMO. It’s always ahead of trends, but also offers a quality take on any trend that it hasn’t started. I never get any MAC items that I don’t love. This holds true with the MAC Kajal Excess Longwear Smoky Eyeliner. The name tells you exactly what it is and does. It’s a richly pigmented eye pencil that can give you precise lines and looks or can be smudged and smoked out to look like eye shadow. But you have to act fast and follow with a smudger brush because the formula sets and then stays put. It’s pigmented, creamy, and allows for lived-in eye looks — you know, like you slept in your makeup but didn’t. I’ve been using it to line my waterline and under my lower lashes and then I smudge the f**k out of it. Voila — instant smoky eyes with TWO products. It’s like I’ve teleported back to 2003….
Crickle Daisy (it sounds British but the brand is actually based in Los Angeles) reels have been flooding my Insta feed so when I had a chance to snag some samples from PR, I had to see what the fuss was about. Crickle Daisy is a self-care brand that peddles loungewear and lip balm. The Lip Balm Treat is smooth and sweet. Is it reinventing the lip gloss wheel? No, it’s not. Not by any means. But it gets the job done. Before you retire for the night with your Crickle Daisy PJS, you can give your lips some nourishment with a swipe or three. You will wake up to the softest lips.
Did you know SZA has a beauty brand? Probably NOT! Sorry, I had to. NOT BEAUTY offers up super shiny-without-being-sticky, minty glosses in small, wood-like packaging with a fat wand. I’ve been applying and reapplying like my life depends on it! The brand has as many shades as it does merch items but TBH, it’s one of my fave low-key, low SKU launches. SZA was selling the glosses at pop ups on tour, making them feel more like merch and more special than just another celeb beauty line. I’m all about Quartz (which is clear and blinding with shine) and DTM (clear with pinky sparkles) with no lipstick and no liner. Just three swipes. No, NOT BEAUTY isn’t doing anything different with sparkle and shine, but I still love it. Maybe it’s the perceived scarcity? Maybe it’s the simple efficacy? Maybe it’s both? Whatever the case, I am hooked like a bra strap.
Kylie Cosmetics has grown, expanded, and contracted (depending on who you ask and on what social platform) but there is simply no denying that the hero product Lip Kits in their various iterations are best in class. The brand has issued its debut trio of shades — warm pink Candy K, taupe nude Dolce K, and deep-as-its-name-suggest True Brown K — in the soft Plumping Powder Matte Lip format. They added the dusty pink Kylie, as well. It’s an air-whipped matte texture and comes with a matching liner. Fill in the surface of lips with liner, swipe the matte lippie over top, and suddenly, it’s 2016 all over again. With fall right around the corner, rich, textured, blurred, and velvet-y lips are here to stay.
What goes best with pigment-saturated, rich matte lips? Oh, just dewy skin! It’s all about contrast and balance. Tower 28 Super Dew Highlight Balm gives you all the glow without the glitter or the mess. It’s glass skin in a square compact. No brushes, no tools, no frills. Just glass skin. I use my clean, bare pointer and middle fingers and tap along my cheek bones and cupid’s bow, and I get a a sheen that’s subtle — it’s not reminiscent of the ‘Gram when Jaclyn Hill’s glow was so powerfully epic, it could communicate with the satellites.
I’ve covered this product in the past but I am resurrecting it. It’s not new, but it’s the holiest of grails. Rituel De Fille Black Orb Enigmatic Eyeliner is the sooty, smudgy cream eyeliner of your dreams.Grunge eye makeup — you know, messy, smeared, imprecise, smoky, inky, and dewy lids — is back in a big way. You can build layers of this densely pigmented stuff. It’s also perfect for goth queens and rock ‘n’ rollers who didn’t sleep with their eye makeup on but love to look like they did.
When you want some shimmer but don’t want to commit to any sort of radioactive glow like that which was all the rage and super ‘Grammable in 2016, Live Tinted’s Hueglow Drops is the stuff of legends. It hydrates while you shimmer. If you’ve ever been intimidated by highlighted skin, this formula will boost your confidence. You can swipe on your decolletage and shoulders, too! It’s not quite sweater weather yet, so you can still show some skin!
