Makeup Wars: Beauty Storage Solutions

I Bought It Myself

This week on Makeup Wars we're sharing how we store our massive makeup collections. I'm the first to admit that beauty bloggers are not the typical consumer. We are hoarders, we collect makeup and will ignore any warning to throw away powder makeup after 3 months (seriously, I don't know where some of the guidelines come from. Nothing really can live in powder. Sharpen your pencils, they'll be fine below. Mascara you should probably toss for real every 3 months though.)

Yes, I have more blushes, eye liners and lip glosses in my bathroom right now than a "normal" person would use in their entire lifetime. And my husband will laugh at me for sharing how I organize it all. Why?

That's why. That's a small part of my office floor. Things that are waiting to be tested end up all over the place after I take pictures, and I just don't have a system for organizing it all.

My bathroom isn't much better, I have a pretty messy vanity area when you take into account the items I use every day, things that I'm currently testing, and stuff that hasn't yet found a home.

But, when you look behind closed doors, I actually am pretty organized!

The most organized spot is probably this closet, which is found in my office. This is about 2/3 of my nail polish collection, I probably have well over 2000 polishes. For real.

To store my polishes, I've taken the original single shelf out of the closet and put in an Ikea Ivar System. I love that this is super adjustable, I move the shelves around as needed. I have this same set up, but taller. Cheap and perfect for my needs!

On the shelves I have 2 drawer sizes from The Container Store. I've found that while these drawers are stackable and stable for shirts and other lightweight items, for something heavy like polish you only want 2 or 3 units at a time. Putting them on shelves like this makes everything steadier. I use the shirt and accessory drawer for polishes. These are tall enough for even my OPI polishes (my bottom 2 drawers are both filled with OPI), but don't leave a lot of extra space unused on top. The sweater drawer is what I use to hold items like extra remover, lotion, etc.

I organize these drawers by brand, really because that's how my mind works. I don't think "I want to wear a purple polish", and then go to a purple drawer. Instead, I tend to think "I want to wear OPI Lincoln Park After Midnight" and go to the OPI drawer.

Underneath that messy bathroom vanity, I have 7 drawers. There are 3 on each side and 1 shallow drawer in the middle, I thought I'd show you what I have in 6 of those drawers (number 7 is on the bottom left and is where I store things like extra Venus razor blades. Kind of boring.) These drawers are pretty well organized, though sometimes things will get moved around a bit because my 2 year old likes to play with my "makeups". I took these pics today without cleaning up. It's hard to tell from the size of these pics, but everything is well contained within their own little organizers.

1. This is the middle drawer on the top, I put things that I use pretty much every day here. It has my favorite concealers, my lash curler, my daily translucent powder and a few blushes.

2. This is a drawer that I need to purge. It's mostly eye liners and mascaras. I use shallow drawer organizers from Target to keep the 2 separated.

And yes! Most of the mascaras need to be thrown away, after I've tested a mascara for 4-5 days it gets put here and I honestly haven't thrown things away for about 7 or 8 months (I'm not actually using them, which is probably good, they're just taking up space). Why does this happen? Because I test the mascara and put it in the drawer, in case I want to go back to it in the next few months. Why would I throw it away immediately? That's silly. But they tend to build up and I haven't had time to purge them in a while. #keepingitreal (And there are multiples because of different colors and waterproof vs regular.)

3. This is my single eye shadow drawer, it's on the upper left. I use those same drawer organizers from Target here. I have the products sorted by brand.

4. This drawer has extra face products. BB Creams, primers, blushes, concealers, you name it! They're all there.

5. Eye shadow palettes and my loose powder shadows. Again everything is in an organizer and I can easily find what I'm looking for.

6. My lippie drawer. I have Glossybox boxes to organize here, but I need a new system. I haven't figured that out. Currently there are 4 clear drawer organizers on the bottom and a 5th sitting on top, they all are sorted by brand and gloss/lipstick (except for a few thrown on top by my toddler). It is actually fairly easy to find what I'm looking for. Those curlers to the left are there to distract my 2 year old, she ALWAYS goes for them!



How do you organize your stash?