Nudes, Sticks, and Instagram: A New Makeup Line for Millennials

What do Millennials like? When it comes to beauty, they like nude shades and things that come in sticks. Think natural-looking makeup that takes less than five minutes to do, says Jenny Frankel, a chemical engineer who has designed products for M.A.C. and Color FX and has now launched a makeup line called Nudestix. Her teenage daughters helped her design the collection, which consists of eye pencil sticks, lip and cheek combo pencil sticks, concealer sticks, and mascara.

I've been using the eye pencil in bronze every day since I got it, because I'm a Millennial and I do indeed love nudes and I love sticks. I love that it takes up zero room in my bag and that I can put it on in two seconds. The sticks themselves are very well designed. They're somehow the perfect chubby but not too chubby, short but not too short shape that makes you just want to grip them in your little Millenial fist. As promised, they come in a bunch of nude colors ranging from the nearly beige to the nearly brown, with a little pink thrown in for the lips and cheeks. The mascara comes in black, which may seem like a violation, but on most eyelashes black is nude so no worries there. Basically Frankel and her daughters were right about nudes and sticks and Millennials.

They were also right about smudging. All the eye pencils have smudgers on the ends, because Millennials love to smudge and why not? Smudging is a good creative outlet in a world where more and more of our creativity involves looking at pictures of creative people on Instagram. Millennials love Instagram, Frankel told me. In short, Nudestix is a niche brand for the Millennial-who-doesn't-have-time-to-do-her-makeup-because-she-was-busy-looking-at-Instagram niche, and it fills that niche well.

You can buy Nudestix at Space NK stores, select Bloomingdales, and at spacenk.com.

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