Fall means pumpkin patches and amazing soups and cozy sweaters and long walks through the leaves…and it also means that things have to get switched up a little in the beauty department. We're not in full wintertime dryness mode yet, but still: nothing like the present to start preparing for the Sahara-like conditions to come.

What this means for me:

The nail color I'm into right now: a kinda dusty mauve shade that's a little on the "lilac" side of pink and feels very old lady-ish to me, in a good way (meaning, I suppose, an antique-teacups-with-little-rosettes-on-them way).

Get The Look: Essie Secret Stash

Now, this color isn't exactly a "trend" - more like "a color I think is pretty and feel like wearing right now"…so let's move on to a few more right-this-moment looks that I'm excited about. (Mostly, I'm excited that we appear to have collectively moved on from that crazy nail art trend that did very little for me other than cluttering up my Pinterest boards and making me feel inadequate for the past year.)

I write about beauty on a semi-regular basis and am in the middle of filming two beauty-focused shows for Allure, so I try out a really lot of products in search of the ones that I think are great enough to tell you about. My favorite products to try out are always the weird ones (like this hairy gel and this "décolletage" mask)…but I also love it when I come across one of those beauty must-haves that are so useful that they end up taking the place of several other things that used to clutter up your makeup bag.

I hate clutter.

Presenting: two of my favorite recent discoveries, both of which I'm wearing in these photos and both of which give serious bang for the beauty buck.