It's officially spring! I'm super excited for a bunch of different reasons, mainly all fashion and weather related, but as I was cleaning my apartment last weekend I confronted a harsh reality: I'm a beauty hoarder.
You see, I get tons of samples. Being a writer means that beauty brands like to send me stuff, unsolicited, in the mail. When I was working for a magazine, it was way worse, but I haven't really purged my makeup drawers (yes, that is an "s" as in plural) for a looong time.
I realized that this was cluttering up not only my bathroom, but was also beginning to take over my dresser and my shower. Clearly, something had to be done.
So, I did some research and figured out how to spring clean my beauty routine and now I'm going to share these tips with you!
The situation has gotten so bad in my house, that one of my best friends was over the other day and when she stepped into my bathroom she screamed: "MARI!!!! It looks like 3 girls live here!" My husband, delighted, was all like, "See?! I told you. I'm going to sign you up for that show Hoarders."
While I love that show, I most definitely do NOT want to be one of it's featured stars. I broke down and started rifling through my insane collection of makeup brushes, lip glosses, powders and hair and skin treatments, trying to decide what I could actually part with.
I watched this awesome video to figure out what was actually gross and old and then I got to work:
Embedded content: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_yB82fRpQQ
First up was the brushes. These were actually easy to par down because some of them were just old and funky, and others I had never really figured out how to use. I got rid of any and all tools that smelled bad (a tell-tale sign of fungus or mildew) and then moved my way through the ones I knew I would never use, because, quite frankly, I didn't know how to. The ones I used on a regular basis got a thorough washing with some baby shampoo and were set out to dry. I cut down on my tools by about 50%–SUCCESS!
Next up was my makeup. I used the same sniff and separate strategy and managed to lose about half of my mascaras immediately–these go bad quickly, I found out. Then I moved on to my foundations. Anything that didn't match my skin or wouldn't if I was just one shade darker or lighter got the boot, as did a ton of my powders because, honestly, I have dry skin and those formulations just don't work for me.
Then I moved on to my lip glosses and blushes. I had a ton of never-opened lip colors and recognizing that I didn't actually need every single shade of pink under the sun, I gathered a bunch of unopened glosses to give away to friends and family. Blushes were easy to get through because with my darker skin, only a few really make the impact necessary to work for me, so pretty soon I was down to three or four shades.
Nail polishes were another thing. I fall in love with new colors every season and right now, I have a really good collection raging from bridal pink to fuchsia to brown-black to a killer Chanel blue I'm waiting to bust out for the perfect occasion. But ya know what? I haven't been storing them correctly! Apparently, you should really try to keep your polishes in the fridge ladies, to make sure they last. So, I looked through my polishes and begrudgingly got rid of any that had already separated and stored the rest in my fridge.
I'm STILL not totally done, but I think this was a good start. I need to just recognize the fact that you only really need one shampoo and conditioner at a time. Same with face wash–I'm not a professional aesthetician here! Why, oh, why do I feel the need to keep all this crap?
Do you hoard beauty products?
