a cure for makeup madness

It’s only right that we get our homes in order with some organization….

Being home a lot more due to Covid-19 made me want to get my place together. It’s easy to ignore small projects when you’re busy with life but staying home and looking at the same space over and over sparks some creativity. I’m quite a fan of makeup and I got bit by the ‘product junkie’ bug which resulted in me purchasing quite a bit of beauty for myself. Brushes, lipsticks, eye-shadow palettes.. you name it. And because I enjoy receiving makeup just as much as I enjoy buying it for myself, I also asked for more as a birthday gift. The good book says, “you have not because you ask not” so best believe that when I asked, I DID receive. So here I am, overflowing with items and no place to store them. I don’t have a true vanity with proper storage to begin with… just some things that I make work for the time being. Take a look below…

Doing makeup in the bathroom is a struggle I had to overcome quickly, so insert a student desk and a plastic organizer..lol! Both items I’ve had since college and just chose to re-purpose instead of tossing in the trash. As you can see, the space is filled with way too may items which leaves me with very little room to actually do my makeup. Everything feels way too cluttered throughout the beat down process and I find that it takes me longer because stuff is everywhere. I’m knocking the foundation over while I’m reaching for the concealer. I have to stop for a second to make room for products as I go… it was too much.

If you think my desk is bad, you’ll think my storage organizer is worse. Each drawer is literally one big box with no type of divider or individual sections. All of my products are dumped inside and scattered. No matter how much I tried to “organize”, everything would get jumbled again since there was no way to keep them organized. And you know what that resulted in? Makeup being forgotten and not used because it was lost among everything else. So I decided to finally do something about it and get my makeup act together.

I wanted to keep this affordable so instead of going out and buying completely new furniture, I challenged myself to make it work with what I already had. I’ve seen drawer organizers in kitchens and bathrooms and figured I could utilize the same thing for my plastic bin. I took measurements of the drawers’ length, width and depth to ensure the organizers I purchased would fit inside. I searched a few websites but ultimately went with something I found on, none other than, Amazon. The set came with multiple sized containers which I thought would be perfect for the different types of products that I had. Some were more shallow, while others were deep and I thought the combination would be suitable for what I needed done. I also bought an organizer designed specifically for eye shadow palettes and another for compact makeup. I had to stop myself because there were so many options to choose from. I quickly reminded myself that the goal is to reduce clutter, not add more to it!

Apparently I’m better at using a ruler than I thought because the organizers fit perfectly! I probably could’ve purchased some that were a teeny bit bigger but overall, it’s a great fit. I played around with how to position the organizers within the drawer and quickly found a format that would work. As I was sorting through the makeup before organizing it, I realized that I had quite a bit of old makeup and products that needed to go. This was the perfect time to do some cleaning and I think having my makeup more organized will prevent this issue in the future. I started with the lipsticks and tried my best to sort them by shade, e.g., red/orange, pink, purple, nudes and glosses. Any miscellaneous colors went into the group most similar to it. I repeated the same process with products such as highlighters and eye lashes. I grouped things together and organized them accordingly. For my eye shadow palettes, I arranged them by placing my most frequently used palettes in the front, with the ones I reach for on special occasions in the back.

It feels so good having all of my makeup in order! I was able to take most of the items off the desk, which gives me a clutter free work space and it looks so much better to the eye. All of my makeup was a pretty perfect fit for the current space that I have so let’s see how much self control I’ll have in the future. If you see a follow up organization post, just know that my bank account is empty but my face will be beat!