#30days Home Organisation Challenge
DAY 19: At a time of year when many of us are looking to get more organised, you have already some serious decluttering around the house this month… but when was the last time you sorted through your makeup and toiletries? Cosmetics are meant to enhance our beauty, and if you look in some people’s make-up bags or drawers, it certainly isn’t pretty! Free product samples are some of the biggest culprits for clutter. We gather them up in hotels or from magazines but never get around to using them. If this sounds all too familiar, then it’s time to be honest with yourself, if you’re not the type of person who actually uses samples, it’s time to get rid of them!
JOURNAL:
Do you fill in the spaces in your life, or allow others to do so?
What is the most important place in your house to keep clear? What routines do you need in place in order to keep that space clear?
TASK:
Sort Your Makeup & Toiletries
A Few Tips to Sort your Makeup and Toiketries
Cull out-of-date makeup
Do you still have a 1980s lipstick in your makeup drawer? Make-up has a use-by date, and its lifespan is shorter than you probably imagine. As a general rule, once opened, liquid products should be kept for no longer than six months, and other products a year. Old makeup can harbour germs, and dried-up products such as mascara and nail polish are no good to any one, so ditch any old products to help cut down on clutter.
Be honest about what works for you
We all have that eyeshadow palette that we love to look at, but hate when any of the colours are actually applied to our face. Make an honest, methodical assessment of all the grooming products you have by lining up all your make-up up in groups of colour or type, then go through and find out what works for you. You may find that a foundation simply doesn’t work with your complexion, or that lipstick looks much better in the tube than it does next to your skin tone. If you find an item you don’t like, bin it.
Donate products to a good cause
One of the reasons it’s hard to declutter cosmetics is that we don’t really know what to do with them. After all, it seems terribly wasteful to throw out a used-once palette in the bin, but most charity shops won’t accept makeup or toiletries, especially if they're not sealed. Take a bag of cosmetics next time you meet up with your girlfriends, as that blusher that looks plain weird on you may well be perfect for your friend.
Recycle empty makeup containers
Many makeup empties, such as mascara and eyeshadow palettes, cannot be recycled at home. However, Priceline as part of their ‘Greener Together’ recycling program, we’ll take your makeup (any brand) and recycle it into something new. With the support of Maybelline New York and TerraCycle, they’re cutting down landfill and protecting Mother Earth. Once stores have sent the makeup containers to their recycling partner TerraCycle, the empties are sorted, melted and converted into a usable raw material format that can be repurposed.
Plastics materials are used to manufacture new products such as outdoor furniture, community garden beds, watering cans, bins and even playgrounds. Glass and mirrors from makeup items will be ground down and used as road base. To find out more about the recycling process visit the TerraCycle website.
“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”