Makeup purge

For many years, I had a Kaboodle box that housed all my makeup, or at least it tried to house all my makeup. Like a lot of other women, I like to wear makeup sometimes. Personally, I am more of a shopper of makeup than a wearer of makeup. I love going to Sephora and drug stores to look through the makeup aisles and imagine the product's potential on my face. I can't tell you how much money I've spent on makeup I've never used up, but I can tell you it's a lot!

So one of the things I've done recently is to clean out my makeup collection. First, anything that was really old and expired got thrown out. I never wear nail polish anymore so I threw that stuff out next. Then came the hard part. I had some lip colors that I love, but rarely wear. Same with eye shadows. It's almost as if I enjoy the idea of wearing these colors more than I like actually wearing them. Sort of like being in love with the idea of being in love more than actually wanting to be in love. Anyways, it took some time to sort through the colors to figure out which ones I would actually wear and which ones I would not wear but like to think that I would eventually wear one day. These are usually very saturated colors like metallic green and iridescent blues.

The truth is, I don't know how to apply makeup well. Since I normally don't wear makeup, I don't get a lot of practice. So in trying to figure out which colors to keep, I ended up considering which ones I actually had the skills to apply without making myself look like a clown. So most of my eye and lip makeup ended up in the trash. Once I got into the groove of throwing stuff out, I was tempted to just tip the whole box of makeup into the trash and swear off makeup forever, but I knew that wasn't going to happen.

Anyways, then I had to look through my foundations and brushes. Yes, I bought brushes because I imagined I would one day practice enough to learn how to use them. What I realized is that my sucky skills aren't helped with brushes. However, I like brushes because I can clean them and reuse them, unlike a lot of sponge applicators. Anyways, I had a couple of bottles of foundation, plus primer, finishing powder, eye primer, plus mineral powder foundation. I almost never use this stuff. I keep it around for fancy events or when I actually feel like I have time to put on makeup.

So just to note, I have all this stuff because in the past, makeup always either ran, smudged or faded really fast. Reading makeup tips online (thank you internet!) I found that if you put on primer first, then foundation, then dusted with some kind of "finishing" powder, the makeup will last longer. Apparently, there is also a separate primer for the eyes. So yeah, on days where I had to put on makeup, I'd spend almost 30 minutes just putting crap onto my face. A full blown routine would look something like this:

1. Moisturize
2. Primer
3. Foundation
4. Eye Primer
5. Eye shadow (this could take several minutes depending on the look you want)
6. Eye liner
7. Dust face with powder 
8. Mascara
9. Blush
10. Lipstick

Then of course, you gotta do your hair, which I usually just tie back and call it done. Lol!

So going through my makeup collection also made me really want to streamline my makeup routine. I would wear makeup more often and waste less of it if it were less of a hassle to put on. So after throwing out so much stuff that I barely had any makeup left, I thought about how to acquire makeup more wisely going forward. That's in the next post!