Tom Ford Fire Lust Skin Illuminator

Is Tom Ford Beauty’s $65 Skin Illuminator in Fire Lust more like a candle or a five-alarm blaze?

Hmm…

Well, let’s just say that it’s a little like trimming your bangs…if trimming bangs had anything at all to do with liquid face illuminators.

Put another way, it’s a subtle effect that won’t hit someone over the head, but if you point it out to ‘em, they’ll probably say something like, “Oh, yeah… I can see it now. Kinda.”

Unblended on the left and blended on the right

Surf’s up, brah! Channeling an endless summer with the new Bobbi Brown Nude Beach Face & Body Bronzing Duo, $42

Bobbi Brown’s Nude Beach Face & Body Bronzing Duo ($42), a new super-sized bronzing powder duo, does NOT mess around.

I’m pretty tan to begin with, courtesy of the Pacific Islander gene pool, but when I wear this bronzer — daaaayum! — I look hella bronzed, brah, like “Hook me up with the kama’aina discount because I’m local!”

It’s gotta be the lack of orange undertones…

Nude Beach just doesn’t have ‘em. There’s a reddish, pinkish brown with a matte finish on one side and a brick reddish-like brown with a subtle sheen on the other. Both colors contain a lot of red and could pass for a natural tan. With these, whether worn separately or together, you’ll look like you’ve been surfing every day for six months!

For a faux endless summer tan that lasts all day long, on the parts of my face where the sun naturally falls — my forehead, around the edges of my face, across the tops of my cheekbones — I lightly dust a 50/50 blend of Nude Beach’s two bronzers using Sonia Kashuk’s Brush Couture Powder Brush (a great drugstore dupe for Bobbi’s $50 Bronzing Brush).

Pretty big, yeah?

The new MAC Hot Nights Blush from the Temperature Rising summer collection, $23

MAC Hot Nights Powder Blush is for those times when you want your cheeks to look like they’re “glistening” (let’s not call it sweating; it’s not nearly as cute), like after some hot hubba-hubba action or a seriously vigorous elliptical session at the gym.

Got time? I hope so, because I wouldn’t even bother with this berry pink unless I had a few extra minutes for blending. That’s how pigmented it is. But I think it’s worth every second, especially if the theme of your evening is, “huntress on the prowl…”

Where Ripe For Love, the other blush from the Temperature Rising collection, can pull off naughty or nice, Hot Nights can’t.

Because it’s straight up naughty (which is nice).

Howdy, pigment!

Here I’m wearing the new MAC Strobe Liquid Lotion Golden Elixir ($31) from the limited edition MAC Temperature Rising summer collection

When you wear MAC’s Strobe Liquid Lotion in Golden Elixir ($31) you’ll look radiant and golden like…

1. A Grecian goddess soaking up the last rays on a summer day
2. J. Lo after running a 5K in Christian Louboutin pumps and a gold lamé catsuit
3. A sequined Oscar gown on the Best Dressed list
4. A Beyoncé-themed Christmas tree
5. Jeremy Renner’s glistening arms after saving a family of stray kittens from drowning
6. A mega millions lottery winner the moment right after she tells her bosses to suck it and walks out of the room in a dramatic exit
7. An extra in a Britney video circa the golden years, aka BF (Before Federline)
8. A proud kitty stage mom who just found out her baby cat won the award for best actor in a gravy commercial and is dabbing tears from her eyes with a lace hanky
9. A reflection in a mirror after easily slipping into those goal-weight skinny jeans that you’ve been holding onto for months
10. A room full of Skarsgårds
11. A room filled with 1000 birthday cakes, each cake miraculously calorie-free (so you can eat as much as you want!) and topped with 1000 candles
12. MC Hammer after he tried on his first pair of gold Hammer pants
13. Someone who just discovered Nutella
14. A girl on vacation laying on a beach towel in Kauai reading The Great Gatsby
15. A lightning bolt tattoo streaking across Channing Tatum’s tanned stomach

Babe, you know I love me some MAC Strobe Cream, so I feel like I’ve been waiting all my life for Golden Elixir. It’s a lightweight, golden liquid highlighting lotion that you can wear on bare skin and/or layered underneath or on top of makeup (foundation, blush, face powder, bronzer), and it’s bomb for getting that dewy, golden Cat on a Hot Tin Roof type of glow without looking too metallic.
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Wearing the new, limited edition $23 MAC Ripe for Love Powder Blush on my cheeks from the Temperature Rising summer 2013 collection

5 things MAC’s Ripe For Love Powder Blush would say if it could talk

1. Ditch your boyfriend.

Boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever. Your tanned skin and I, we belong together, just the two of us, you and I.

I don’t care where we go. I don’t care what we do. I don’t care, pretty baby, just take me with you. Let’s hit that beach we talked about, sip umbrella drinks, and nap all day long because I’m from MAC’s Temperature Rising collection. And I’m hot like that.

At night, you can put on that look I like with the chocolate smokey eyes and glossy copper lips, and then dust me on top of some bronzer on your cheeks before we head out.

Oh, the trouble we’ll find…

2. I’m officially called a mid-tone peach but…

…I think of myself as a papaya.

A juicy, ripe papaya begging to be devoured. Don’t even bother with a spoon. No shame! Just bite into that thing, and let the juices dribble down the side of your chin in slow mo.

3. I hate your shoes.

Blergh! Especially the flat Life Stride pair that you borrowed from the cafeteria lady wear when your feet ache.

Screw that. My name is Ripe for Love, hello! — so I’m all about, pardon my French, the fracking pumps. One layer of me on your cheeks (that’s all you’ll need because I’m pigmented like whoa!) and you’ll be glowing like Halley’s Comet.

Why? Because I’m THAT good, if I do say so myself.

4. I have a softer side…

It’s true. My scene, like my friends in Temperature Rising, is more about sultry summer nightlife, where molten metallics throb and glittery glosses throw air kisses with shimmering bronzed skin.

But look, I’m not all about seduction. I also have a softer side.

I can go from Do Me Baby to Let’s Wait A While in the flick of a wrist. All it takes is the gentlest caress of my feather-light powder on your cheeks, so we can do all kinds of things together, like go to the ice cream shoppe, your next book club meeting, work — heck, even that froo-froo yarn store where you fondle all the skeins but never actually buy anything.

I promise, I’ll behave.
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