Beauty Cull 2020 - The Prequel

Hello lovely ladies.  

We’re knee deep in January eh.  It’s a time of reflection and of new beginnings.  It’s also my time to review my beauty products and toiletries.   And with the cold and windy weather we’re having and gardening not on the cards anytime soon, the house is getting some long-awaited attention, and that includes my bathroom cabinet.

I was chatting this morning with the so lovely Janet of The Gardener’s Cottage and she’s going through a bathroom review too.  You can read her post MY BEAUTY BUDGET, HERE,  do pop over.  You’ll enjoy this and ALL of her posts, I’m sure. 

I’ve only just started my annual review/cull/replace and I’ll report back with my findings soon.  You may be doing the same thing, so I thought this an opportune time to repost my post from a few years ago, then you and I can see how my 2020 review compares.  

Will there be repeat buys?  Will there be never-to-be-repeateds?!

Does that sound like a plan?  Fun, even?!!

I’d love to hear how you deal with your beauty review, whether you’re doing a review right now or if you totally ignore best before dates and best after opening dates.  

Please drop me a comment with your thoughts. 

My 2017 Post

Hi guys!  Gosh, I'm sounding so American.  But "guys" sometimes just sort of, well, fits.

Just thought I'd touch base with you on my declutter programme ... and the floodgates decluttering can sometimes open.  My programme continued in the bathroom.   I don't think I dare show you my chuck-out pictures.  Embarrassing.  

All past BBD medication were taken to the chemist for disposal. 

Here's my tidy cabinet.  I'm enjoying it as it won't stay like this for long!

And with medication addressed, I moved on to make up.  Firstly,  all make up and toiletry bags were washed in The Great Make Up Cull of 2017.  Then make up was culled, using the approach detailed below.  The cull exposed so many worries, it opened up The Floodgates of Concern.   There were many but I now give you my two main areas of concern regarding make up.  I have many other areas of concern, but make up is a pretty safe topic to open up about!

Best After Opened (BAO)

Life was simpler before those blasted little open jar icons started appearing on beauty products. Common sense was used back then.  A product was thrown away when it was empty, had dried up, looked dodgy or when I realised I'd bought it in a country I'd visited in the last millennium!

Along came that little icon and opened up yet another area of my life that I should be very concerned about.  Nay, paranoid about.  Because it frequently touches on eyes and those I am uber-paranoid about.

Those little icons are useful - but only up to a point.  For how on earth can you remember when every single item of make up was opened?  

They're bought at various times.  They're opened at various times.  They have varying BAO periods.  The labels are minute so you can't scribble opening dates on them.

I'm still fairly relaxed when it comes to non-eye area make up (I don't see much danger there) but it's a minefield for someone as concerned about eye hygiene as me!

So the test I applied during this latest make up cull was draconian but necessary.  Any eye make up that I bought prior to last summer has been binned.  Most are in the 3-6 months range anyway and this chuck-out gives me a clean slate to work from.

I've devised a simple new make-up control plan.  Buy make up at the beginning of the year then I can easily control opening dates.

  

I'd be very interested to hear what you put in place to control your make-up's recommended life.

Or is this paranoia restricted to Pout World only?!

Eye Pencil/Crayon Sharpeners

I like eye pencils and a couple of years ago I became a big fan of chunky eye shadow crayons too.  

But I've recently started worrying about the hygiene aspect of the pencil sharpeners needed to keep them in their prime.  During my cull I washed make up brushes, tweezers, scissors, that sort of stuff, all in really hot water with lots of rinsing, but when it comes to those sharpeners I washed, well I see lots of hiding places for germs to lurk and I'm still dubious about using them for eye products again.

As a result of my paranoia, a lot of pencils and crayons have been binned during this purge.  Some have been used only up to the first need for sharpening and around the time when my sharpener paranoia set in.  Many are within their BAOs but need sharpening - so they have to go.  

They have pointlessly given up their lives (see what I did there?!).

How do you keep your eye pencils and crayons hygienically sharpened?  I'm intrigued.

But there is some good news.  Nature's way of compensating for my old age fuss-potting about eye hygiene is that when retired, you tend to use less make up.  In recent years I wear it less frequently and use fewer items.  So my new controlled approach to make up is a doddle and easy on the purse - I need to buy fewer items and they should last me the duration of that dastardly BAO icon!  

So last week I bought a couple of eye shadows, new brushes, eye liner and brow pencil.  

Frequently used foundation, mascara and skincare products are replenished on a rolling programme. 

 And the big news is that apart from a blast of red lipstick for special occasions, I tend not to use lipstick anymore.  I use flavoured Lipsyl or The Body Shop's Born Lippy.  I think they look better on pensioner lips. 

So this is what my streamlined make up bag looks like now.

Neat, huh?

So an embarrassing amount of make up has been culled and it leaves me with two three questions, 

1) Is anybody out there as paranoid as I am about eye make-up hygiene and BAOs? 

2) Anyone know if there are "self-sharpening" chubby crayons on the market? 

3) This hurriedly added third questions is, have you become more of a worrier, more paranoid about things generally as you've got older? Does just about everything in life give you cause for concern these days?

 I certainly have become a worrier (as evidenced in this post) and it's not a nice place to be!  

I'm forever being told "You worry about everything!" or "You're a scaredeypants!"

A la perchoine.

Light Touch 2018 - I Find A Waistcoat !!

Hi again, darlings, so glad you popped back again today.  You're a glutton for punishment!

Yesterday we talked about decluttering and Death Cleaning -  here's Part II of my  shaggy dog story.

Christmas came along and the bathroom tidy was put on hold, with me scratching my head over where to store towels and toiletries.  Fast forward to the first few days of this year.  Time to return the Christmas decs to the loft.  Yeah yeah, nothing to do with bathroom tidying, I hear ya!  But it does.  Read on ...

  I'd seen a blogger post of decs nicely stored in see through boxes.  

I had storage envy.

So out went the battered old cardboard boxes.  In came these beauts and things were looking good.  Apart from TP declaring that there was no floor space in the loft to store these beauts.  Thus early in January we found ourselves clearing a space in the overfilled loft.  A loft that has only existed for eight years, yet is filled to the gunwhales.

Obsolete luggage, lampshades ... you get the picture; charity shops and dump people don't know what's hit them!

Creating the space for the boxes also necessitated the clearance of a pile of wood we'd forgotten about, absolutely new wood which had been used to pack the kitchen we installed in 2010.   The dump man told us it just gets thrown on to landfill (a real shame), so we decided it would be perfect for shelves.  Shelves for the bathroom cupboards, declared TP. 

You see, the cupboards running under the eaves have no shelves.  So they have attracted the wrong sort of clutter.

Without prior notice TP decided to start on that little project last Saturday.

Of course, we first had to clear the bathroom cupboards of their, err, carefully curated items.

No nice way to put this bit, chaps.  Picture the bathroom floor covered wall-to-wall in old towels, curtains, cushions, yaddayadda, oh and toiletries, ca. 2010,  the year the cupboards were built.

I didn't take photos.  That upset me for all of two seconds, until TP responded with "Would you really like your readers to have seen the mess?!"

And he was right of course,   It was just toooo embarrassing.

I expect what I've learned at this point is that when you put stuff in a loft or a storage cupboard that isn't used frequently, things get forgotten.  Then they get so old (or out of date) that you don't want to use them by the time you do eventually become 

reunited with them. 

Fast forward to Friday just gone - almost all of the contents of the two cupboards have been dumped or taken to the GSPCA, save for a handful of cushion covers (and a few other choice pieces!), which I've laundered.  Shelves have been built.  Lighting has been installed.  Oh TP is a wonder DIY'er!

Storage boxes have been filled with towels, PJs and in-date spare toiletries.

 



It's all there bar the inside painting.

I am sooo excited.  It feels like storage cupboards have been magic-ed out of thin air, because they just weren't used properly previously, so it was like they didn't exist. But now that they are shelved and lit, they've identified themselves as what they are, very useful storage in a very small house!

And all because The Pout wanted to store her Christmas decs neatly in plastic boxes.

Now, I did promise you a shaggy dog story in Friday's post and I think you'll agree that this certainly is such a story.  Because at the end of this lonnnnng post, there is a link to the cinema outfit.  For, in amongst the mess in those eaves cupboards I found my few choice items, 3 suede skirts and a waistcoat.  So I threw them in the washing machine.  Yes, suede, thrown in a washing machine!  You see I had nothing to lose as they'd previously been wiped from my memory banks anyway and thus didn't exist.  And they've come out just fine.

And that is how I was able to wear a brown suede waistcoat to the cinema, peeps!

Decluttering is a First World problem.  I get that.  Declutterng this house has always been a "when I retire" sort of project.  But when I started to fear that someone might have to clear up MY mess, spurred on by seeing TP organising the total clearance of two houses (mentioned yesterday), well, the time is now and Death Cleaning has commenced.

And following my Light Touch 2018 approach, I'm dealing with one area of the house at a time, then moving on to the next on my list. It's light touch, little tweaks ...

So now I just have to ask you, what's your take on decluttering?

Is it not needed because you keep on top of things, ongoing?

Or do you have lightning speed purges?

And have you started thinking Death Cleaning ...?

A la perchoine.

Please note that the writer does not recommend washing suede and cannot be held liable in the event of laundry mishaps.  She washed hers because she had nothing to lose as the items would have otherwise been dumped.  Only chance washing suede if that's your situation too!

Light Touch 2018 - The Bathroom Tweak

I chanced upon an article by Margareta Magnusson in last week's Time magazine.  It's about Doedstaedning. That won't mean anything to you unless you're a Swedish speaker.  She translates it as Death Cleaning but I think it's translation is broader than that, like Death Placing or Preparing.

Anyway, semantics over, I had great empathy with her article as I've found myself of late looking around the house and thinking that I don't want someone to have to clear up my mess, you know, "when I'm gone".   And it seems I'm not alone in this.  It's something we do.   It must be similar to that surge of cleaning and organising one's supposed to have just before giving birth.  Instinctive.  Primeval.  Only at the other end of life.  And without the pain.

In the last year or so I've had a few surgettes of decluttering and organising but they were just that, little surges.  What's kicked off a more serious approach, the Death Cleaning, is a situation we found ourselves in last autumn, when TP by default was charged with the clearance of the two homes of a departed relative.

The experience took my concerns for Death Cleaning to a whole new level.  So I've walked through the house, identifying the areas of mini-hoarding which need decluttering, cleaning and re-organising.  And there are a few!  But my Light Touch 2018 approach allows me to make this an easy and hopefully pleasant journey, tackling one area at a time.

Without any real planning on my part, the upstairs bathroom was the first area to get my attention before Christmas.





 We hadn't used it that much in recent years; the area was without organisation and, as you can see from the pic on the left, a bit of a dumping ground - towels mixed with spare toiletries, spare toilet brushes mixed with toilet rolls.  So without any real game-plan. I tidied up the area as best I could.

I tidied up skin care items into a basket, and after this pic fitted a toothbrush arrangement on the wall.

This was but a bathroom tweaking, a light touch tidy up.  There's a bit more sense to the room now.    But I still needed to find a home for the towels, seen here stored in cubes.  I realised that the under-eaves cupboards would be perfect for towels and spare toiletries, but they were, errr, rather full, but more on that tomorrow!  Yes my dearies, I fully appreciate that your lives are busy and you've probably had your fill of me by now, so I've split my post in two.  I'm keeping the second part of this shaggy dog story until tomorrow.  

Come by again Sunday to find out what was in those innocuous looking storage cupboards.

And I'm sorry but you'll have to wait till then to find out why I was wearing a suede waistcoat to go to the cinema!

A la perchoine.

The Great Make Up Cull of 2017, a.k.a. Poutey Scaredypants

Hi guys!  Gosh, I'm sounding so American.  But "guys" sometimes just sort of, well, fits.

Just thought I'd touch base with you on my declutter programme ... and the floodgates decluttering can sometimes open.  My programme continued in the bathroom.   I don't think I dare show you my chuck-out pictures.  Embarrassing. 

All past BBD medication were taken to the chemist for disposal. 

Here's my tidy cabinet.  I'm enjoying it as it won't stay like this for long!

And with medication addressed, I moved on to make up.  Firstly,  all make up and toiletry bags were washed in The Great Make Up Cull of 2017.  Then make up was culled, using the approach detailed below.  The cull exposed so many worries, it opened up The Floodgates of Concern.   There were many but I now give you my two main areas of concern regarding make up.  I have many other areas of concern, but make up is a pretty safe topic to open up about!

Best After Opened (BAO)

Life was simpler before those blasted little open jar icons started appearing on beauty products. Common sense was used back then.  A product was thrown away when it was empty, had dried up, looked dodgy or when I realised I'd bought it in a country I'd visited in the last millennium!

Along came that little icon and opened up yet another area of my life that I should be very concerned about.  Nay, paranoid about.  Because it frequently touches on eyes and those I am uber-paranoid about.

Those little icons are useful - but only up to a point.  For how on earth can you remember when every single item of make up was opened? 

They're bought at various times.  They're opened at various times.  They have varying BAO periods.  The labels are minute so you can't scribble opening dates on them.

I'm still fairly relaxed when it comes to non-eye area make up (I don't see much danger there) but it's a minefield for someone as concerned about eye hygiene as me!

So the test I applied during this latest make up cull was draconian but necessary.  Any eye make up that I bought prior to last summer has been binned.  Most are in the 3-6 months range anyway and this chuck-out gives me a clean slate to work from.

I've devised a simple new make-up control plan.  Buy make up at the beginning of the year then I can easily control opening dates.

 

I'd be very interested to hear what you put in place to control your make-up's recommended life.

Or is this paranoia restricted to Pout World only?!

Eye Pencil/Crayon Sharpeners

I like eye pencils and a couple of years ago I became a big fan of chunky eye shadow crayons too. 

But I've recently started worrying about the hygiene aspect of the pencil sharpeners needed to keep them in their prime.  During my cull I washed make up brushes, tweezers, scissors, that sort of stuff, all in really hot water with lots of rinsing, but when it comes to those sharpeners I washed, well I see lots of hiding places for germs to lurk and I'm still dubious about using them for eye products again.

As a result of my paranoia, a lot of pencils and crayons have been binned during this purge.  Some have been used only up to the first need for sharpening and around the time when my sharpener paranoia set in.  Many are within their BAOs but need sharpening - so they have to go. 

They have pointlessly given up their lives (see what I did there?!).

How do you keep your eye pencils and crayons hygienically sharpened?  I'm intrigued.

But there is some good news.  Nature's way of compensating for my old age fuss-potting about eye hygiene is that when retired, you tend to use less make up.  In recent years I wear it less frequently and use fewer items.  So my new controlled approach to make up is a doddle and easy on the purse - I need to buy fewer items and they should last me the duration of that dastardly BAO icon! 

So last week I bought a couple of eye shadows, new brushes, eye liner and brow pencil. 

Frequently used foundation, mascara and skincare products are replenished on a rolling programme. 

 And the big news is that apart from a blast of red lipstick for special occasions, I tend not to use lipstick anymore.  I use flavoured Lipsyl or The Body Shop's Born Lippy.  I think they look better on pensioner lips.

So this is what my streamlined make up bag looks like now.

Neat, huh?

So an embarrassing amount of make up has been culled and it leaves me with two three questions,

1) Is anybody out there as paranoid as I am about eye make-up hygiene and BAOs?

2) Anyone know if there are "self-sharpening" chubby crayons on the market?

3) This hurriedly added third questions is, have you become more of a worrier, more paranoid about things generally as you've got older? Does just about everything in life give you cause for concern these days?

 I certainly have become a worrier (as evidenced in this post) and it's not a nice place to be! 

I'm forever being told "You worry about everything!" or "You're a scaredeypants!"

A la perchoine.

Decluttering - But Not In A Good Way

This post is a bit of a name and shame post, a bit like washing my dirty linen in public. For I am decluttering my food cupboards, in public.  And I feel very bad about it.

Decluttering is rife in Blogland right now, e.g. clear 25 items in January. I have to say that I've never previously started the year with a hardcore declutter campaign, they've usually happened randomly through the year (if at all!).  But it makes sense to tidy and organise the house in January and the rest of the year is guilt-free!

I've just come out of 6 weeks of lethargy and I was itching to tackle some tidying and some organising head on and besides,  I wouldn't feel guilty when reading of other bloggers' good work if I participated.  So I did.

From hereon it gets embarrassing.  I started with the kitchen, an easy target as I knew that was an area I could easily rack up the numbers as for some months (years?) my food cupboards have been getting out of hand. The embarrassing bit was how much I cleared from my food cupboards.

The above came from the jar cupboard.  Easily more than 25 items in this batch alone.

Many things were way past their BBD but they would probably be edible; however, I know that the date would put me off each time I thought of trying them.  So they got ditched.

(I of course emptied and recycled all tins, plastics, cardboard etc.  I'm not a total baddie!)

I give you the purged jar cupboard - I can now go in here without things crashing down in the cat bowls below.  Jar cupboard, my No. 1 target, done!

Next came the condiments cupboard.

Yup, another name and shame moment.  But what to do, nowhere here will take past BBD food.

The Big Cupboard came next. This is it tidy - can you imagine what it was like before?!

I cleared out other less offending cupboards and my last was the one below. 

I was so swept away by my work at this point that I forgot to take after-shots.

But I think you're getting the picture - I've haven't tackled these cupboards in a while! 

So, dear readers, I'm on target with my de-clutter.  But not in a good way.

Because a lot of food has been thrown away, which in today's world I feel bad about.  I also feel bad about it in yesterday's world.  My mum used to love doing grocery shopping with me, because her fave bit of the task was to put things away in cupboards (which I've never been a fan of).   She'd look at the stocked cupboards with such pleasure.  She had experienced the struggle of coping with the availability and cost of food as a girl and then bringing up a family, so an abundance of food in later life was something she valued highly.

Yes, I felt bad getting rid of so much food.  But it got me to think of mum's food shortage, it got me to think of the world's food shortage.  And although my stockpile of out-of-dates was not intentional, I do not want to create this situation again. 

It got me to realise that I need to approach food shopping and food usage in a more organised way.

Who would have thought that meaningful reflection and resolution could come from emptying a few cupboards in order to get with the decluttering programme! 

Now, what about you, dear readers?

Have you got caught up in the decluttering bug?

Or are you someone who keeps on top of things?

A la perchoine.