Getting my shit together

I've been trying to organize myself this year, so far. Not really as a New Year's resolution, but it so happens that with the new year comes a slightly less horrendous, or at least more flexible, schedule for me, and so I am attempting to take advantage of that. One of my main goals is to sort out my apartment. I moved in August, but I didn't find time during the entire fall to completely unpack. I had a friend stay with me for a week in December, and I had to make her sleep on an air mattress in the living room instead of the spare bedroom/office, because that room was completely filled with boxes and bags of crap that I hadn't gone through since moving. I still haven't been able to put away all of that shit, but I did manage to clean off my desk, and now I have a work space that is not my bed or my couch. It's amazing how much more productive that has made me. When I sit at the desk, I actually get work done. It helps that it is in the corner facing the window, so I can't see the heaps of clutter that are still piled on the other side of the room - but I'm chipping away at those. At this rate, by the time I (likely) move out of here in the summer, I'll finally have everything sorted out.

Part of my process of getting my shit together involves ridding myself of shit I don't need and not acquiring additional shit. My biggest mass of hoarded stuff is my collection of (surprise!) makeup, nail polish, and skincare. Though I haven't set any strict goals for myself, I am trying hard to use things up and to discard things that I don't want to use. I just filled up a box with nail polish and makeup and posted an offer on Freecycle. Hopefully someone will take it off of my hands. I have a few nicer things that I just don't use, and I think I am going to try selling them to Glambot. (Anyone have experience selling to that site? I'm curious to hear about it.) I am also trying to use things that have been sitting around for a long time - not just makeup, but things like travel size bottles and packets of shampoo. I think I have enough of those hoarded at this point that I can probably go six months minimum without having to buy any shampoo or conditioner. I have been holding on to them, because they are useful for travel. I used to go overseas to do research, but I haven't done that in a few years. I have no idea when I will have secure enough employment to get research trips funded again, so there's no use keeping that shit around for who knows how many years. I can always buy more small bottles of hair products in the future if I need to (or save some empty bottles and refill them).

I'm also trying not to buy any new makeup for two reasons: to save money, and to use up some of the things I already have (original concepts, I know). I haven't bought anything so far this year, and I don't really foresee doing much makeup shopping for a while, though I am still regularly tempted. (Yesterday Nouveau Cheap posted that my favorite topcoat was on sale for $10, but by the time I saw it, it was sold out. So, yay?) I am still getting Birchboxes, since I paid for a year in advance, so I do occasionally have new little things to play with. But the lack of buying is one of the reasons this blog has been moving a bit away from reviews - though it never was strictly (or even mainly, I think) reviews. The other reason is that I don't have a lot of free time, and so I haven't been posting a lot of anything, obviously. I think I am going to be posting more things like empties and quick reviews of things I have had for a while, instead. I hope those are interesting for other people - I always enjoy them when I see them on other blogs.

If you're in a place where you are also trying to cut down on clutter and stop buying things you don't need and organize your space, there are of course lots of resources out there. It seems like everyone feels like they are failing at this - we can't all be, right? But here are some of the places I've found motivation or commiseration:

The Makeup Talk No-Buy Support Forum: There are lots of interesting conversations going on here from people who feel like they have too much makeup. Reading through these, you'll either feel like you've found your people, or you'll feel some kind of relief because it turns out that many other people actually have way more stuff than you do (I won't say which category I fit in myself). I've had fun in these forums. If you want to make some serious changes, there are lots of challenges and projects people are working on that you can take part in.

When Budget Beauty Starts to Hurt: This is just a short article about how quickly buying cheap makeup can add up (from The Billfold). Don't I know it. (Sorry if I have enabled anyone else's hoarding.)

Unfuck Your Habitat: This fits in the cleaning/organizing category. I totally knew about UFYH before it was cool, guys. And yet I haven't really used it - but I am still recommending it, because I know a lot of people who have found it extremely helpful. They have an app that is supposed to be great, too, and I think I am going to buy it soon and actually give it a go.

The January Cure from Apartment Therapy: I signed up for the mailing list and then immediately fell behind, because my schedule was too erratic (the downside of the "flexible" schedule I mentioned above). But the sequence of tasks is a good one, and I am thinking that I will try to work through them at a much (much, much) slower rate.

So that's just me rambling about my general goals and intentions. I have been doing pretty good so far. It's slow progress, but I am not increasing my hoard, my apartment is slowly coming into order. Today I pulled all the bags of old shoes and winter wear and curtains (?) out of the hall closet. They are still in a pile in the middle of the room, but they are my next mess to tackle. I've also found more time for cooking, which I really couldn't seem to do much of in the fall. That's been really good both for my budget and my health (I love my crock pot).

Anyone else on this same track? Any other resources or links to related stuff you'd like to share?

Thinning the Hoard

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.
Someone once asked me how I decide what to keep and what to get rid of when sorting through my accumulation of makeup products. Now seems like as good a time as any to write a post about that process, since I just realized that I'm going to have to move in less than 6 weeks. Ugh! I mean, I'll be glad to get out of my current shithole of an apartment, but apartment hunting and moving are huge pains in the ass.

Before I pack everything up and move it somewhere else, I'd really like to eliminate as much of the useless shit I have lying around as possible. My piles of unnecessary belongings extend far beyond just makeup, but since that's what I mainly talk about here, that's what I'll stick with right now. Writing it all out is a useful process for me, because it forces me to come up with realistic rules for myself about what I should or should not hold on to, and to spend the time to consider whether or not I really have room for various items. So I'll go through a few categories of cosmetics here and lay out some guidelines upon which I'm basing my decisions about what to keep and what to set free. If you can think of any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Trash or Keep

There are certain items that I can easily decide to hold on to, such as products that I use on a regular basis and/or one that are unique and well-loved, and there are those that I can easily dispense with, because they are of no use to me.

Trash: There are some things that I'm never going to use, and that I also don't think anyone else should use. I tend to come into the possession of shit that falls into this category through subscriptions (Ipsy, in particular), free samples/gift-with-purchase deals, or the occasional impusle purchase. For example, in a recent Ipsy bag, I got some "Mark Fading Pads" by Proactiv, and the first ingredient in them after water was SD alcohol. No thanks. I don't want to use them, and I don't want to subject anyone else to them, so bye bye.

Practical, non-perishable stuff: This category includes products that will get used up eventually and won't expire in the meantime, like eyebrow pencils. Yes, I have too many of them. But they don't take up a lot of space, and they will be fine waiting for me to get around to finishing them. Just don't pick up any new ones in the meantime, self.

Those categories are pretty straightforward. But I also have a lot of things that are more difficult to classify. They may or may not be superfluous. They probably are, but it's helpful to think carefully about why, so that I don't regret passing them along to someone else, because I am ridiculous.

Makeup

Eyeko Skinny Liquid Eyeliner and Urban Decay 24/7 Velvet Glide On Eyeliner

Dupes: I confess that I own a lot of unnecessary dupes and products that perform basically the same function as one another. One example is black eyeliner. Everyone has a favorite black eyeliner, and so I've picked up quite a few along the way that I've heard good things about. I don't really like to open something that I don't yet need, so I have several brand new black eyeliners just sitting around waiting for attention. And I don't even fucking wear black liner very often. Why did I buy them? (Anxiety?) I'll hold on to a couple in addition to the ones I'm currently using, but the rest must go.

Musings about makeup hoarding and anxiety and stuff

I'm going to write a post soon about the process of sorting through my embarrassingly large hoard of makeup and on what basis I choose what to keep and what to get rid of (someone asked me about that once). Working through it has left me reflecting on why I accumulated all this crap to begin with. I'll have more to say about that in the upcoming post, but right now I just want to go ahead and blame grad school for saddling me with more makeup than any person who is not a makeup artist or a dragon who lives on top of some kind of giant sparkly heap of cosmetics under Lovely Mountain should reasonably possess. Certainly more than a person should have who is only just now kind of getting into lipstick and barely has enough eyelid space for more than one color of eyeshadow.

Hear me out on why grad school is one of the top factors to blame for my recent acquisitiveness and rampant consumerism (there are others, which I'll think about another time). In my experience, and in my observations of people around me, grad school seriously exacerbates people's latent pathologies/neuroses and brings out their weirdest behavior. Exactly what form it takes is different for everyone. It's much like any other prolonged, stressful situation in that respect, with the added bonus that the sorts of people who choose to go to grad school, and particularly those who pursue doctoral degrees, seem to be more prone to neurosis to begin with. In my case, I've always been fascinated by shopping/fashion/beauty, and I definitely had some hereditary hoarding collecting tendencies, and so this all came together in a compulsive need to own one of everything in every color. If you've been to grad school, you might be nodding knowingly, though many people spend their meagre grad school stipends on other, non-cosmetic, substances or develop totally different vices. If you haven't been to grad school, be satisfied with your life choices - or if you are considering going, do some research on anxiety/depression/mental illness + academia before you enroll.

Now that I've transitioned from grad school madness to post-grad school unemployment bleakness, I've cut down on the buying. I'm not trying to do some kind of "no buy" thing, because . . . that's still a sort of fixation on (not) buying makeup that doesn't work well for me. But the stress of unemployment is more of a general, hollow despair rather than an amped up, self-conscious anxiety, and it's hopefully temporary, so it's time to start sorting through the heap and move on to other preoccupations.

(I'm still having fun with the blog thing, though.)

Swatches and mini-reviews of all my retractable/automatic eyeliners

Disclosure: This post contains some Amazon affiliate links.
This is another one of those posts that is the result of my swatching all of the products I own in a certain category in order to determine if I want to keep them all. I'll write a more detailed post in the near future about how I decide what's working and what's not, since I'll be moving in a couple of months, and so I'm try to sort through my hoard and do away with things I don't need. For now, here are swatches of all the retractable eyeliner pencils I own. There weren't as many as I thought before I pulled them all out! But still too many, in general.

Oops, not the best camera setting. They are all quite straight in reality.

I swatched most of my regular pencil liners (i.e. the type you have to sharpen) a while back. As a rule, twist-up liners are stiffer and/or don't set as well as pencil types (for the reasons outlined here - scroll down to #4). Some of these retractable liners are just as good as some of my pencil liners, though.

On to the swatches!

Swatches (left to right) of:

• ULTA Automatic Eye Liner in Golden Eyes (wearing it in this post) ($8)
• Avon Glow Eye-liner in Copper Paradise ($6 I think? discontinued - but still available on Amazon)
• Jordana Easyliner in Eggplant ($2)
• ULTA Smokey Eyes Automatic Eye Liner in Cobalt (wearing it in this post) ($8, discontinued, but the cobalt one here might be similar)
• Stila Smudge Stick in Blue Ribbon ($20)
• ULTA Automatic Eye Liner in Teal Blue ($8)
• Essence Long-Lasting Eye Pencil in Tu-Tu-Turquoise ($2.50)
• Milani Liquif'Eye in Green ($7)
• NYX Retractable Eye Liner in Gray ($5)

The oldest makeup in my hoard

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links.

Ancient cosmetic artifacts.

In the last few years, two main things have changed about my makeup collecting habits. First, I have such a ridiculously large hoard of makeup and nail polish that my past selves would be baffled and probably judgmental if they knew what was ahead. (We could psychologize about what has motivated this change in behavior in me - latent hoarding tendencies coming out, the consumerist mentality of blogging, ramped-up procrastination efforts - but let's skip that for now.)

Second, because I have so much of everything, I am much more ruthless about what I discard. I still don't throw things away unless they are absolute garbage, but I have a lower threshold for what I will give away to someone I think would like it better, and a higher threshold for what is worth keeping around "just in case I decide I want to use it some day." That last point is debatable, I guess. I do have a lot of colors of eyeshadow that I almost never wear, for example, but that I think I might want some day. But if they perform poorly and aren't getting use, then they're out.

That all means that if I had done this exercise even two years ago, I would have a lot more old crap lying around to show you. As it is, with one main exception, these are all things I still like and use.

I'll go through the list in chronological order, based on the year in which I think the product was acquired. All dates are approximate! I don't really know exactly when I picked up most of these things. It's based more on a general sense of where I was in my life when I first used it. More relative dating than absolute dating, you might say.

Note: There are lots of photos below the jump.

ca. 1995: Annabelle blush brush and unknown powder brush

I guess these aren't technically makeup, but they're the oldest objects in my hoard at the moment. I "borrowed" both of these from my mother when I moved out of my parents' house to go to college in 1999. I'm sure she bought them several years earlier, which is why I'm putting them at 1995, but they could be even older than that.

Never Buy a Razor Again (Or: Where to Get Free Shit)

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At this point, I have 5-6 brand-new razors in my cabinet, and I didn't pay for any of them. Since I only shave a couple of times a week, those will last me months. Some of them came with refill blades, too. (And remember to use this technique to keep the blades sharp twice as long.) Razors are one of the easiest things to get free samples of online, next to shampoo and conditioner, toothpaste, and hand cream. Remember when I showed you my hoard of bath and beauty junk? Most of that was free. I have probably a year's worth of free shampoo and conditioner in there.

Everyone knows about requesting free samples online, right? Or do I only think that because it was one of the first things I did when we got the internet at school in around 1996? I like free things, I like getting (non-junk) mail - perfect. Either way, maybe I can give you at least one source here that you're not already aware of.

Of course you're "paying" for these products with your own time, whatever it takes to find the samples and fill out a form to request them. But if you tend to sit around playing on your computer/device during your downtime anyway, you could do this and get some things in return. You also have to provide some of your information to these companies. I can't emphasize this enough: make yourself a dedicated email address to use for things like this. You will get spam. You might also want to sign up for a Google voice phone number to use. Don't put in a fake phone number - I got multiple calls every day for a few months from spammy sources when someone used my phone number to sign up for something. Not cool.

But enough lecturing, here's where to get the free shit:

Free therapy via Beauty Reductionista

See why I'm trying not to accumulate any more shit? This is just the
part of my hair and skin care hoard that is not in current use in my bathroom.

Okay, this is going to make me sound like a weirdo to certain people, but I think it will be familiar to others: I get such satisfaction from sorting through my hoard of makeup, skincare, and haircare shit, deciding that to use next, and especially from finishing things. The act of using up the last little bit of a bottle of shampoo that I've had going for months is a joy like no other.

How Gross Am I? Or: How Long Do You Keep Makeup?

I admit that I don't follow the usual rules when it comes to discarding makeup. I tend to keep things much longer than the guidelines advise. I'm semi-convinced that most of these rules are part of a conspiracy by cosmetic companies to get you to keep buying unnecessary replacement products. I was also raised by a woman who has salad dressing from 2009 in her fridge and tries to tell me, "There's nothing wrong with it! Smell it!" So.

I think I have now accumulated enough e.l.f. products to do all of my makeup with just that one brand.

The concealer/powder area is the weakest in my collection, but I could swing it. One of these days soon I'll do a full e.l.f. look and post a photo. It's going to be fucking cool, just you wait.