By Anastasia Burton
Given the ongoing COVID-19 threat, all of us are doing our part to social distance and keep others safe during this uncertain time. However, social distancing is leading to serious boredom, especially for young people. If you’re stuck on how to spend your free afternoon, or just enjoy procrastinating, now is the perfect time for beauty buffs to do a much-needed beauty clear out. Try organising your makeup and get rid of all the old, dead and expired bits, Marie Kondo style. So, how do you know if you even need a big beauty clear out? Let me guess… I bet your make-up bags no longer zip up and your beauty drawer is overflowing. Are you finding random make-up items around your room, under your bed and in your house? Then this article for you.
Make-up is wonderful, fun, and makes you feel good, but let’s be honest, you have no use for 60 eyeshadow palettes and 30 highlighters. Of course, it’s nice to have options, but maybe there are just too many. If we all followed the expiry dates on our products, we would have to go through palettes in 12 months and sometimes 6 (which is impossible). But! If you have a palette that’s over four years old… follow Elsa’s example, and LET IT GO!
Marie Kondo suggests that before decluttering your make-up, you should pour it all out in front of you. After all, it’s only when you see everything you own that you can see what you don’t need. Once you pour it all out, gather the make-up items in their respectable categories: so, eyeshadow palettes with other eyeshadow palettes, single shadows with other single shadows and so on. This helps you to have a better view of what you’re dealing with, as well as give you a hint at where you need to make serious cuts and where you might need to purchase updates.
When everything is neatly put out in categories in front of you, start with whatever you like least and get to the best last. When sorting through your make-up, make sure to consider the following:
1. How long have you owned it?
If the item looks crusty, isn’t performing well, is mainly used up, or just doesn’t smell safe, bin it. There is some leeway with use-by dates when it comes to products like eyeshadow and highlighter, but with mascara, if it’s expired, bin it instantly! Using mascara past its use-by date can lead to nasty eye infections.
2. Do you use it?
If the item has been in your makeup collection for over a year and you still haven’t opened it, or you’ve only used it a handful of times, are you sure you want to keep it? There’s a reason why you haven’t used it often, so unless this item is a fancy eyeshadow palette that you only reach for on special occasions, get rid of it.
3. And most importantly… do you still like the product?
Sometimes, we try products and they just don’t work, which is fine, but then we forget to dispose of them… which isn’t fine. If you don’t like or use the makeup you have, then what’s the point? Get rid of anything that doesn’t, as Marie Kondo says, “spark joy” and bask in the joy of a cleaner beauty drawer.
Now that you’ve considered these three questions, you should have three different piles/ boxes in front of you. A box of items you will keep, a box of items you will bin, and then a box of items that you are unsure about: your ‘maybe’ box, which you will get back to in the end. At this stage, you should have a fairly good idea of what your collection theme is. Ideally, you should have a neutral palette, a colourful pallet, and maybe a palette for special/exciting looks; colours that you wouldn’t usually wear unless it is a special occasion, like a festival. You can also decide about whether something stays or goes by looking at the brand/price range. For example, you are more likely to keep a Huda beauty foundation over a Primark one. So, if you have updated your make-up collection from more cheap/affordable products to more high end/quality products, you should probably get rid of the cheaper ones. If, somehow, you still have products that you purchased when you were a younger teen… bin them!
Realistically, you need to also decide which products you want to put into your “project pan.” To those of you who aren’t aware what project pan is, it is a project where you take a product that you want to use up and attempt to hit pan on it. This helps us make-up lovers to use up products we have had for a long time but don’t what to bin. Anyways, here are the two beauty bags that every makeup enthusiast should own:
1. The everyday bag
You will need a bag for your everyday make-up, preferably with one neutral palette and one colorful palette for a bit of a change. Then you should have one foundation that you want to use up and one concealer. Keep your everyday make-up bag minimalistic.
2. The backup
This backup beauty bag has products you use often enough, but not every day. So basically, this is your back-up bag. If something runs out from your everyday bag, the backup bag is there to save the day.
Now, back to your ‘maybe’ box of beauty products. To decide what to keep and what to chuck in this pile, think carefully about whether or not you’ll really use these items again. Since you have decluttered and given your makeup bags and drawers a fresh start, you should notice a theme with your collection which will help you say yes or no to products in the maybe pile.
I hope you feel inspired to declutter your beauty bag, Marie Kondo style! Now, get clearing out. There is a life-changing magic to tidying up after all…