Organize Your Make-up

I think Organizing has reached an all new high this year, what with us spending so much time at home. I mean, after securing a stash of toilet paper and getting the sourdough bread starter going, what else to do during this Covid season except work from home and organize your closets?

Except for me. My friend, Michelle, got me organizing my drawers and closets as a New Year's resolution (one drawer a week. Then, one section of the closet every week. Little chunklets, bit by bit, not too overwhelming). Which is to say, I've already organized the more obvious trouble spots. Plus, I spent a lot of my Covid time working on Cold Soup (check out the recipe for Peach Soup here).

And here is proof that if you add champagne to the aforementioned Cold Soup, like Gentle Readers, Geo and Shelby did here, you have a truly delightful cocktail!

Cocktails! So distracting! Let's talk about Organizing! With the closets done, I turned a critical eye to my make-up. Here is how I've been storing my make-up:

Yep, just throw it all into one powder dusted tin. It's actually not a huge problem. Certainly I've lived with this method of storage for a really, really long time. I'm not going to go on like those info-mercials, "Can't find your mascara???" and rummage through my make-up and stare helplessly at the camera. I assure you, I have left the house looking presentable, even though my stuff is stacked all willy-nilly in a metal bucket. The question is, Can This Situation Be Better?

Like, every two years or so, I go through the medicine cabinet and throw out medicines that have expired. Okay, so, maybe it's more than every two years. The point is, it was time to go through the make-up. And going through the make-up made me realize that a better system was needed. Because I found moldy make-up at the bottom of this container. Yes, various compacts had drifted to the bottom, forgotten, unseen, and had developed a life form of its own. You may ask, "How did you know your make-up had molded? Maybe you just forgot what it looked like." Here was my clue: when Clinique calls the eye shadow Naughty Plum, and the color is actually now more akin to Swamp Green, then you know that something has gone terribly wrong.

Now, I may or may not have mentioned that I come from a long line of Inside Organzers. Meaning, we organize from the inside out. You will never look at my kitchen counters and think, "Here dwells an Organized Person." Rather, you might think, "This gal could be a Hot Mess." But you would be mistaken! My Unmentionables Drawer is pristine! Marie Kondo would weep with joy if she saw my t-shirts and shorts so pleasingly folded and catagorized. Sure, stuff is hanging out on flat surfaces right now, but that's because I don't like to stuff things into drawers and cabinets indescriminately - But the real Queen of the Internal Organizing is my mother. And since she has retired from teaching, her counters are looking pretty great, too.

So, when I started to think about organizing my make-up a different way, I remembered how my mom has organized hers. Check this out:

So, my mom sits here, like a movie star.

And here's the organzing part:

Is this so fab? If you have the space in your room or bathroom, I would highly recommend these sliding set of drawers (see something smiliar here).

I don't have this kind of space. But I liked the idea of sorting my makeup on different levels/tiers/shelves so that I could see it and know what's being used and what's not.

Y'all, I wish I could take all the credit for this new storage idea, but that goes to the good folks at Good Housekeeping magazine. Apparently after ending the section Can This Marriage Be Saved?, they're directing all their energy to tackle the organzination crisis.

Voila!

It's almost cute enough that I could keep it out all the time. But I don't because it fits in my cupboard. This fabulous find was purchased from Amazon here. And if I were to ever grow weary of seeing all my cosmetics at one time, well, then I have this really great appetizer serving apparatus, don't I? Win-win!

And then I used this for brushes and other items I like to stand up: