Quick Change

The promise of color-adaptive beauty products? Your most flattering shade is just a chemical reaction away.

- Arden Fanning Andrews

The first compliment I received at Vogue came thanks to a drugstore impulse purchase. It was 10 years ago, during my first days as a beauty assistant at our labyrinthine old 4 Times Square offices. As I made my way down a corridor known for star sightings ( Julianne Moore once smiled at me there), I ran into a colleague, Chioma Nnadi, whom I’d heard editors describe as the most stylish person on the planet. “You always have the perfect lip color,” she said, and asked me what it was. Flattered, I told her about the chubby MoodMatcher pencil I picked up next to the cash register at Hudson Square Pharmacy downtown. On contact its color changed from a light blue to pink, after which I’d blot everything away, leaving only a cherry ice-pop stain that stayed all day. (Even now, MoodMatcher is billed as “the original color change lipstick” that “works with your chemistry to create a totally customized shade that’s truly your own.”)