Kathy Lowden author page

My seven-year-old daughter (also named Tess!) is obsessed with MAKEUP. The other day, she did herself up and asked, "How do I look?" Given my principle of never lying to my kids, it was difficult to make up something that wasn't "like a rainbow threw up a rodeo clown." CLEAN UP on aisle Tess! I managed to say something that didn't make either of us BLUSH, but I did disappear into the SHADOWs before she could ask me more.

Needless to say, AMNESIAC and EGRESS were right on point today.

This concept sounded familiar, so I searched *MAKEUP* in our Finder (the asterisks mean "anything of any length"). Plenty of MAKEUP GAME and MAKEUP EXAM puns, along with an imaginative interpretation of KISS AND MAKE UP, but the last puzzle of this exact nature was back in 2012 — more than long enough that another go-around is perfectly fine.

Tidy intersection of MAKEUP and LINER NOTES — that's a great way to deal with a six-letter revealer. Putting MAKEUP as the last Across entry would delay the punchline until the end, but a six-letter final Across can cause gridding problems.

And crossing thematic entries like this allows for efficient use of space, assuming the letters around the intersection don't cause problems. The K can be a tough nut, but Kathy did a nice job in that region, AKA a fine entry, and not a drop of crossword glue in that corner.

There's a bit of OPIE (outdated) XTRA (adspeak) in other locales, but bonuses such as STALE AIR and ICED TEA more than make up for them.

Not a theme that will shake one's foundation, but the most crucial aspect to a Monday puzzle is newb-friendliness, which this one achieves.

I suppose I'll have to settle for my daughter being the second Tess published in the NYT crossword. Get your butt in gear, said the tiger dad to his five-year-old!

I kid. Sort of.

Despite my spite, I admired so much about this double-debut puzzle. Tess and Kathy managed to distinguish their effort from other hidden GEM, birthstone, rock-themed etc. crosswords I've seen. Three notable points:

• There are so many different birthstone listings out there, many of which include exotic gems like peridot, alexandrite, tanzanite. Although these are fun-sounding words, they'd elude a large swath of newer solvers. Sticking to basic stones that most everyone will know is perfect.
• Check out Wikipedia's list of birthstones. Note how Tess and Kathy focused on the most relevant sub-list, the 2019 US one. They could have easily branched out to draw from everything — CARNELIANS or CATS EYES might have been useful — but focused, making the theme tight.
• Most of the time, they concentrated their hidden letters, taking pairs at a time whenever they could. TH and ST within AMETHYSTS is fantastic, because it lends an elegance that wouldn't have been present if T H S T had been strewn about one by one.

It's far from a dense theme — 40 theme squares is much lower than average — so I'd expect a squeaky-clean grid packed chock-full of color. Solid performance on the latter criterion, with so much SCHNAPPS WASHED UP ARUGULA CABANAS MYSTERY SCANDAL SEA SLUG material. It's rare to get so much mid-length snazzy fill on a Monday, and it was a solving pleasure.

The cleanliness factor needed improvement. Monday puzzles ought to be uber-welcoming to solvers of all levels, and crossings like ELMIRA / ELIA and RES / RANI can scare people off. Along with an inelegant collection of AGT ASA EEG ERG and VAR at the important 1-D spot, it needed another round of revision. Having a central 9-letter entry does create a lot of filling difficulty, but with so few theme constraints, both color and clarity are achievable.

Overall, a debut that I enjoyed more and more as I studied and thought about the themer choices. It would have been great to get an additional layer of clever wordplay, maybe playing on STRATA (rock layers!) + GEM = STRATAGEM, but that could have pushed it into mid-week territory.