We buy makeup because, on some level, we all want to live the kind of life that makeup wants us to live. A concealer, touted by blogs and YouTube and waterlogged magazines at your nail salon, promises to make you look like yourself, but with the skin of an angel, all plasticky and soft focus, like a permanent Instagram filter slapped on top of your actual, real face. Lipstick will change you from a schlub buying paper towels and a bag of Kettle Chips to Nicki Minaj leading a horned-up Drake around a bodega late-night picking out snacks. Mastering a cat-eye in under ten minutes is an achievement worthy of a fucking champagne fountain and a pile of Kettle Chips, all to yourself.
Makeup is supposed to be easy, right? It’s supposed to be fun. That’s the narrative that Glossier, the skincare company started by Emily Weiss’s popular beauty website Into The Gloss, is trying to tell. My contrarian nature prevented me from buying into their shtick of easily-acessible, Instgram-ready beauty products, but after getting my hands on their recent Phase 2 release – via a trip to their tightly-edited, overly-curated pop-up shop, staffed entirely by women wearing Jeffery Campbell grandma heels and silky blush trench coats over cream silk shifts — I am a convert.
It’s the kind of makeup you use when you really, really don’t want anyone to think you’re wearing anything at all. For that, it’s worth it.
Glossier’s Phase 1 set, released in October, consisted of a bunch of shit that I didn’t really want to pay for: a rosewater spray; a moisturizer; a skin tint that looked both watery and oily. But, the Phase 2 set won my heart. Glossier packaged their rave-worthy Boy Brow with two new products – a sheer, matte lipstick called Generation G and concealer called Stretch Concealer – and I’m happy to report that I’m close to throwing away everything I own to dedicate my life and soul fully to this line.
The Boy Brow included in the Phase 2 kit is everything I’ve heard it to be — transformative; amazing; incredible. But! The lipstick and the concealer deserve all of my praise. Glossier calls Generation G a sheer matte lipstick, which sounds like a waste of $18, but I am here to tell you that it’s not. The lipstick goes on more like a balm, and it comes in four colors: Cake, a warm-toned nude that made my mouth look muddy; Jam, a pigmented dark berry; Crush, a bright magenta; and, Like, a mauve-y, soft baby pink that on me – and maybe you! – is the closest thing I’ve seen to reaching that beauty blogger holy grail of the perfect MLBB(my lips but better). It looks like an Instagram filter, but on my mouth, and it’s fucking incredible. In two weeks, I’ll fall in love again with some dumb lipstick I find at Duane Reade because my search for That Perfect Lipstick is a never-ending quest, but for the meantime, this is it.
Somehow, also, the Stretch Concealer managed to change my mind about concealer, once and for all. My skin is aggressively mediocre, peppered with hormonal zits that I fear will never go away and marred by the scars left from gleefully picking at the occasional that shows up once in a blue moon. I’m not self conscious about my skin. It is what it is. The option, however, to make my skin look like its best 19-year-old pre-cigarette self, is alluring. For a while, I tried to convince myself that the cult-favorite Kevyn Aucoin The Sensual Skin Enhancer was something that I could work with, but the texture turned me off and I felt like I needed actual skill to wear this on my face without looking like a crazy person.
Stretch Concealer purports to have special micro-waxes that make it elastic and able to move with your skin. What I found was a tiny pot of what felt like tinted coconut oil, but in a good way. This concealer goes on so light and so sheer that I could mash a full scoop of this stuff into my face and not look bad. Like any dedicated reader of beauty blogs, I pat this shit into my face and watch in amazement as the undereye circles I didn’t even know I had disappear. After wearing this for a week, I gathered every dusty jar of concealer I had and threw them into the trash.
I’m sorry to say this. It goes against everything I believe in, but I mean it with all my heart. Buy into the hype. Let the stickers and that soothing Glossier blush pink and the promise of a better life through some tinted lip balm and a concealer or two soothe you. Glossier is worth it.
Original by Megan Reynolds @mega_hurt
