Show Me Your Declutters!

[RGbrown]

I received an order today with four new lipsticks,

(Lancome L'Absolue Lacquer...I will never ever stop mentioning these every-dang-where 😄😍)

but had absolutely no room for them in my containers. While the thought "buy more containers" crossed my mind for a brief second, I quickly dismissed it as I'm starting to feel overwhelmed with too much stuff. I'd been pulling out one or two here and there, but today was the big reckoning!Sorry I didn't stage a better pic, but that's 55 lip items that are now gloriously gone from my stash!

This is only the stuff I pulled today; I have a small train case packed full of the other lippies (and some palettes) that I've been slowly pulling over the last couple of months. Do I still have more I could get rid of? Yeah, most likely...if I was on the fence, I erred on the side of keeping it rather than tossing. And I didn't swatch every single keeper to weed out similar shades, so there's probably still a good bit of overlap in my berry-heavy collection. But my oh my, I feel soooo much better now. I found not only things I had forgotten about, but things I really had no clue I even owned in the first place 🤣

So...do you have too much too? Ready to clear up some space and salvage a little sanity? Share your declutters with us; we wanna see it! 

[fieldsofclover]

@PinkEvergreen That one was way too light for me... my natural lip color is close to Bite Sake or Thistle.

Sounds like yours might be expired... I got a few on sale and really liked the formula, just couldn't nail down a color. But there's no scent to mine and definitely no texture. I've wondered whether mine might die soon, I'm always suspicious about clearance like that 😂

[fieldsofclover]

Ugh, looking at this photo made me decide I need to repurchase that Dior before buying another random high-end lipstick... I really love that shade (Avenue). At least it was almost done so it wasn't much wasted product, just didn't get the satisfaction of finishing it!

[eshoe]

I did a small declutter last night, I had no idea I had so many unused lip products. I didn’t want to toss the Chanel, but it makes my teeth look yellow, and I have other reds that don’t do that, so it was time to say goodbye. The “Temptress” shimmering powder is a few years old, and while I love the color, I never use it. Then I read the ingredients and it was a no-brained. Glad I hardly ever used it!! Ferric ferrocyanide?!?! 😳

[blackkitty2014]

Oh no!!! I’m dreading to do this with my Tom Ford lippies too @eshoe

[RGbrown]

@eshoe

Oh, I'd hate to toss a Chanel too! Part of my phase two purge will entail having to decide about some of my higher end stuff, and I dread that. I don't have anything quite that expensive, but I do have some NARS and such to go through.

I'm no ingredient expert, but I did a quick recon on ferric ferrocyanide. It was one of the first synthetic dyes, accidentally discovered in 1704 by two Berlin chemists, and is also referred to as Prussian Blue or sometimes Berlin Blue. It was first used to dye the Prussian Army's uniforms since it was much cheaper than other dyes available at the time. Even though the chemical name sounds awful, it is not toxic as the cyanide is tightly bound to the iron, and has been permanently approved for use in cosmetics by the FDA since 1978. ☺️

It also has an interesting medical application, treating people who have been contaminated with radioactive cesium or thallium, or non-radioactive thallium; it binds to those metals in the digestive tract to keep the body from absorbing them. Fascinating!

[eshoe]

@RGbrown, wow thanks for the info! Glad it sounds worse than it really is. Now I want to go dig through my trash 😆 but I will resist!

[RGbrown]

@eshoe you still made the right choice if you never used it anyways. Stay strong! 👏

[fieldsofclover]

Not products per se, but definitely reclaiming some sanity... I did a big organizing sweep the other night and had accumulated all this in various storage spaces. Some part of my brain thought I should be keeping this, but it's now gone to the big recycling bin in the sky!

[mganeshaly]

Ugh, that reminds me I should take a look at my boxes too. I keep the boxes of all my limited edition products 🙈 Some are just so cute!

[RGbrown]

@fieldsofclover 😄

That counts!

I'm usually good about tossing my boxes pretty much immediately, sometimes before I even try the product. I've had a few instances where I realize "dangit, I should have kept that one so I could return this". Not sure that's a rabbit hole I need to allow myself to open though 😝

My grandfather used to keep every single box for every single thing he ever bought, and he'd update them with notes over the life of the product. I had the task of cleaning out some of his basement after he passed, and found things like this gemAnd the base was packed carefully back in the box, just in case it might be useful someday 😛

[PinkEvergreen]

@RGbrown Omg that is so sweet ❤️ I don’t know why but I would love to read little notes like that. 

[fieldsofclover]

@RGbrown That's wild! My parents wore out two of those, but neither met quite that dramatic of a death.

I have those same box-saving genes on both sides of the family, though. I need to figure out how to level up my decluttering skills another notch or two. 

[RGbrown]

@fieldsofclover

It's definitely tough to find that perfect balance of keeping enough without keeping too much. It seems most every time I clean stuff out, I regret getting rid of it later. A couple-ish years ago I tossed my backup hairbrush. It was probably 10 years old, but hadn't been used all that much because right after I bought it, my puppy chewed the handle up pretty good. I had wrapped in tape so I didn't get splinters, but wound up buying a new one because, well, you know...it worked fine but looked like carp lol. I finally decided it was spare and unnecessary and taking up too much room in my one and only tiny bathroom drawer, so I tossed it. Not two weeks later, my good brush broke, and I had to make an emergency Ulta run. 🤦 No wonder I can't let stuff go 😄

[fieldsofclover]

@RGbrown it meeeeeeeee...

Murphy's Law is definitely at the root of a lot of mine, too 😒

[mganeshaly]

So glad I found this thread as I'm sort of going through this right now! I have way more lip products than I would ever use but it's so hard to just get rid of them! What I've been doing in the past couple of weeks is committing to using a different lip product each day or every other day. At the end of the day, if I don't feel like I love it or something just doesn't work as I wish (too drying, not long lasting enough, wears off weird, etc.), I decide whether to keep it, toss it or give it another chance. I could never bring myself to throw away a lot of makeup at once (like a big declutter). I've tried and I still haven't gotten rid of more than half of it thinking I'll send them to Project Beauty as someone else mentioned, local women shelters or friends. Everything is still in a box. So by just focussing on one lip product at a time I'm sort of tricking myself ("it's only this one lipstick that I don't even like") to let go little by little.

[RGbrown]

@mganeshaly

I totally agree it can be quite difficult to let go! I'd been slowly building up to this purge...I was pulling one palette here, one lippie there for a couple of months, then apparently reached my tipping point the other day. Now that I have the bulk of my least favorites gone, I need to do like you are...go through what's left one by one with a more critical approach to formula, staying power, comfort, and just overall satisfaction. I don't necessarily want a small collection, but I want to love everything I have.

I looked up Project Beauty last night, and while they do take some used cosmetics, unfortunately they don't take used lipsticks 😞

[mganeshaly]

I know what you mean! That's what I'm trying to do, keep the ones I really like and organize them so I don't reach for the same ones all the time. And yes, that's the downside of Project Beauty, they don't accept everything and for good reasons. I can't imagine giving something like a used lip gloss or liquid lipstick since there's no way they can sanatize those. I do have other products from a declutter that I've been planning to send for the longest.

[RGbrown]

@mganeshaly

While I completely understand the "no wands" rule they have, I was a bit baffled by "no bullets or crayons either". Those can be easily sanitized. 🤷

[mganeshaly]

@RGbrown Wait, they don't accept those? I thought they did! Now that I don't understand either. 

[fieldsofclover]

Probably to keep jerks from shipping them old nearly-spoiled things. That's too bad.

[JenniferOhJenny]

@RGbrown What a great idea for a thread! Weird question - are you throwing away the items you decluttered? I only ask because every time I contemplate going through my stuff I feel terribly guilty when I think about throwing things away. I hate the thought of wasting money, but having too much makeup/skincare to use up makes me anxious.

*I was proud of myself this morning, though. I had a little sampler set of Etude House products that I only bought because I thought they were going to smell like honey. I tried them this morning and they actually smell very flowery and headache-inducing. So I threw them away :). They were really small samples and not very expensive, but still, progress.