nars

There are two kinds of fall. There’s the fall where you get caught in the rain one gray day without an umbrella and cold raindrops slide down the back of your shirt, making you cry “Yeee!” while you clench your fingers and toes, and then there’s the fall right after the first rains of the season, when the sun returns, at least for a little while, and grasses and saplings have sprouted on the hillsides and turned them all from brown and yellow to green.

That second variety of fall is the one that reminds me of the new NARS Joyous Red ($24; part of the new NARS Holiday 2011 collection). I can’t think of a more fitting red lipstick to wear on a sunny Friday in fall. 🙂

For more on the NARS Holiday 2011 collection, check out…

• NARS Holiday 2011: Product Pics!
• NARS Holiday 2011 Swatches

NARS could have called it Celebration, because that’s how wearing it makes me feel — like I’ve just slipped on a pair of old jeans and found them a little loose (in other words, YAY!).

NARS has a knack for super wearable, eye-catching reds (Dolce Vita springs to mind), and for me, Joyus Red was love at first swipe. Warm, with golden orange undertones and a semi-matte finish, it even has microscopic flecks of golden glitter.

Just gorgeous, and I can’t wait to see it sing on gals with warm skin tones.

The lightweight, unscented and unflavored formula has a semi-matte finish that may be slightly drying, especially if you already have dry lips, so you might try prepping your lips first with a layer of moisturizing balm beforehand. As for wear time, it clocks in at about four-five hours on me (stays on like a MOFO!).

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Heavy traffic makes my inner crazy come out. I know it’s not helpful to get worked up over traffic jams, but it happens just the same.

Like last week, I had a mini-nervous breakdown in bumper-to-bumper traffic on Lombard Street in San Francisco. It had taken me 45 minutes to drive four blocks in the city, and all I wanted to do was get home. At one point I looked outside my window at a boy walking past my car on the sidewalk, and I just lost it. Tears, sobbing — the whole shebang.

It wasn’t just the traffic, though. I was also wearing uncomfortably tight skinny jeans and having a really, really rough writing day.

While driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on my way out of the city, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror. The purple liner I’d applied earlier in the day, NARS Larger Than Life Long-Wear Eyeliner in Bourbon Street ($23; also available in eight other shades), still looked great, despite my outburst and tears.

I figured, heck, if this creamy pencil liner can tough it out, so can I, so I wiped away my tears, put on my metaphorical big girl pants and focused on the road.

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I wonder if NARS was trying to be ironic by making these new Larger Than Life Lip Gloss tubes ($26 each) smaller than their regular glosses. The new tubes, while they do appear larger, actually hold much less product (0.19 oz. versus 0.28 oz.).

And that’s not all. These new plumping glosses, available now exclusively at Sephora stores and also online, even have a smaller brush. It’s about half the size of the line’s regular doe-foot applicator. The smaller size is supposed to make it more precise for application.

I’ve been wearing shimmery blueish pink Coeur Sucré for a couple of days; it’s one of nine colors in the line.

NARS Larger Than Life Lip Gloss in Coeur Sucré (top) next to NARS Lip Gloss in Oasis (bottom) for scale

NARS Larger Than Life Lip Gloss in Coeur Sucré (left) and NARS Lip Gloss in Oasis (right)
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