EDITOR'S BEAUTY PICKS

–What products our beauty editor is loving as of late.

For the sake of honesty, I don’t physically own this product. That’s because it costs $30.00 plus tax at any makeup counter. The reason I decided to include it here is because it’s the best contour pallet I’ve used so far, even if I didn’t leave the counter with it. I was introduced to contour/highlighter when I did my first beauty pageant at age 15. During the prelims, my makeup artist was describing to me what he was doing while he worked. It worked wonderfully onstage, though I wouldn’t use it so heavily for every day makeup. Since then I have experimented with every pallet from Revlon to Bobbi Brown, each with it’s own unique benefits. 

This particular palette comes in four shades, Naked, Native, Streak and Strip (yes they’re all quite seductive). When you make a purchase like this, something you’ll be using daily until every last speck of powder is gone, you want to choose a color palette that compliments your complexion. For example, if your go-to blush is a deep mauve, don’t choose the palette with the bubble gum pink blush. You won’t use it more than once and you’ll have wasted your hard-earned money. 

My palette of choice is their original trio, Naked. This palette contains a darker blush, which, on my yellow-undertone skin appears less artificial, a slightly paler contour color to keep me from over bronzing my light skin and a highlighter color that isn’t overly shiny. Always keep in mind your skin type. If you have dry skin, try a sheer finish. If you have oily skin, always go matte. I tend to have more oily skin, especially in the summer.

I don’t think I understood how important my eyebrows were to my face until I was nineteen years old. Is that sad? My generation had a terrible habit of over-plucking their brows. In high school, it was cool to have stick thin brows. I must have gotten them waxed twice a month. It didn’t matter if it looked a little weird to me, it only mattered what everyone else thought. 

Then I grew a pair and stopped plucking. It took a while to find the right shape right but I am proud to report that my brows are now full, healthy and never over plucked. I pluck only when my brows starting to hide my lids and wax at five-month intervals. I am always sure to tell my specialist not to get too carried away. 

When I groom my brows, I usually go for the wax-based brow pencil. The wax keeps the brows in place so you don’t have to use a gel and most pencils have a brow brush on the opposite end. This compacts the entire brow grooming process into about 50 seconds—perfect for the ever-late individuals like myself. 

Last week I walked into Sephora to buy a new brow pencil when a specialist suggested I try Anastasia Brow Pomade. Pomade is similar to a wax-based pencil in that it keeps the hairs in place so you don’t have to go over them with a gel. The product comes in eight different shades, the lightest of which is my shade, Blonde. 

Blondes have a particularly difficult time finding the right brow color. I know blondes with black brows and I know blondes with almost invisible brows. I like to keep my brow color the color of my roots, which are a much darker blonde than my tips. The fact that the pomade matched my roots so perfectly was what persuaded me to try it out. I also noticed that this product allows you to be more artful with your brows. I’ve found it’s easier to fill in my brows with a small brush rather than a pencil, and while it may take a little more time, the overall look feels much more realistic. 

It took me a long time to find the perfect lipstick. I searched far and wide; I tried on hundreds of shades at every makeup counter in Chicago. But it wasn’t until I stumbled into Walgreens for tampons on a rainy Saturday afternoon that I found the best lipstick in the world. It turned out not to be a $20 designer lipstick, but an $8 drugstore lipstick from L’Oreal Paris.  

A girl’s lipstick collection is a bottomless pit of possibilities. There are lipsticks for the good days, the bad days, the lazy days, the hot days, the clubbing days, the first date days, the man-eater days, the “I feel like punching someone” days and all the days in-between. And each of those lipsticks transforms a woman’s pout into an entirely new facial feature. With a new shade of lipstick, a girl can be anything or anyone she wants. But, every girl needs her “go-to shade” and I was severely lacking. I had every shade of red, peach, purple, orange and even, dare I say… orange. But I could never find the right nude.

The right nude will be different for everyone. My natural lip color is a very pale pink. At first I thought, this should be easy—pale pink is easy enough to find. It wasn’t. There are a million different components to a lipstick. The right color is always too shiny, the right finish is always the wrong color and the best of both is always way too expensive.  

Finally, on that fateful day at Walgreens, I found what I was looking for. After I bought my tampons, a painful burning on my lips brought me into the makeup isle for Chapstick. After picking up Burt’s Bee’s Honey Chapstick (the best Chapstick ever) I began browsing through lipsticks. Frustrated and hormonal, I grabbed the cheapest nude lipstick I could see. The next morning when I swiped the creamy nude blend across my lips, I widened my eyes at my reflection. Alas, I had found it—the perfect lipstick. 

–by TAYLOR SCHEIBE