worth it: wet n wild balmstain

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Imagine my astonishment when I tried this $3 lip crayon (a meet-the-shipping-minimum gamble) and absolutely loved it. Slick, gel texture, uniform pigmentation but not so opaque as to be any kind of trouble, any kind of fuss, nice gloss level (not too high), moisturizing (not amazing but it’s not a farce to call it a balm, as with some we could mention), no strange smell…really kind of surprisingly great, and especially great for $3. This color, officially the Wet n Wild MegaSlicks Balm Stain Moisturizing Lip Color in Red-Dy or Not, is lovely, too. A warm rosy red that comes up a little more terracotta on me than it seems in the stick.

I’m often throwing on whatever lip thing in the morning and investigating later on, how it’s going, and this one was impressively present, still, a few hours in. I kind of made a face in the mirror, like, what are you still doing here?! It’s not like it doesn’t wipe off on things like your coffee cup, it does, there’s just somehow still some left on your lips for a good long while. I think it might actually stain a little! [Research not yet conclusive] Like no lip stain ever seems to be able to do.* And the cap clicks on pretty well! And hasn’t fallen off on me. YMMV but this ticked a lot of boxes for me.

*Work on this technology, industry, this is a gold mine.

Upshot: there are much worse things you could do with $3. On top of which they’re bound to go on sale sometime soon in a pharmacy near you. I may try some of the other colors.

 

reading: Durrell, Ellis, Bettelheim, Vaughan/Guerra

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Clea, Lawrence Durrell — The last book of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, a vivid and beautiful series. I find Durrell highly musical, though not always pitch perfect (as I often find, for example, Nabokov). I remember being amazed that he mentions in his Paris Review interview writing these books in some incredibly short amount of time, and they have a fast fluidity about them. Good.

American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis — I haven’t seen this movie but was drawn to the book after 1, hearing this Bookworm interview with Ellis, who came across as sort of thoughtful and interesting, or I think it was this podcast, and 2, being directed to the business card scene in the movie, which is entirely worth your time. Christian Bale so fitting here. The book is fascinating if you are into first person narrators and doing strange things with them, and presents a surreal juxtaposition of minutely detailed hyper-consumerism with excessively violent homicidal mania, all dotted with bright insightful moments. Parts of it were nearly too gruesome to read, for me, and I don’t have any wish to watch more of the movie, being possessed of an impressionable imagination. I really still wish I hadn’t watched The Exorcist. Still. It’s interesting. Especially if you are a writer.

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim — I love stuff like this. Really can ingest no end of it. This is I guess popular in child development circles but I find it engaging in its own right.

Y The Last Man, Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra — Such a great, thorough, thoughtful (often creepily believable) execution of a thought experiment; what would happen if (almost) all the men died? Totally riveting, in parts, and Agent 355 is such a badass [black! female!] character. Recommended. My geek friends have only been telling me to read it for 5 years or something. You were right, geeks, you were right.