• After a long makeup break, I’ve been experimenting with my collection again. Mysterious to me at the time, my face also broke out. (More on this later…)
• We dog-sat a friend’s pups. Once you find someone else with the dog-depedency-syndrome, you’re quick to start trading favors!
• Unfortunately, that same day I arrived back home with a fever after not feeling well. My fiancé Josh banished me to the bedroom. (Oh, how I hate being stuck in bed all day on a weekend…)
• Fortunately, the rest was worth it, as I woke up Sunday feeling brand new. (Josh wasn’t so lucky. Oops!)
• We’ve been in a financial slump as of late, so it’s rare that I find myself out “window shopping” these days.
• However, I found myself at Target, armed with beauty product coupons and ready to use them. I couldn’t help but look around.
• …Which lead to my Monsieur Cock discovery. Is this not the cutest thing? (It’s a bit of an inside joke.)
• I also arranged what I hope to one day be my coffee tray. Yes, I take products and arrange them in the store… A girl on a tight budget has to fulfill the need to decorate and organize somehow. I took a picture in hopes of coming back sometime soon to purchase. I wanted to make sure my coffee grounds fit on the right, and I needed time to let the cost of the silver tray set in. ($20 for such a tiny tray, what the heck Target?)
• I got home with my newly purchased beauty products and then began what I call the biyearly purge — I had to go through all my beauty supplies and toss out anything older than 2 years. (Have you done this recently? Do it! Save your skin!)
• I also had to toss things that didn’t suit my skin tone anymore, or that I knew were breaking me out. (Cue the revelation for why I suddenly had acne issues after using my makeup again.) I figured better safe than sorry.
• This lead to a cleaning frenzy in which I organized my entire bathroom cabinets, washed my makeup brushes to death, and wiped everything down.
• Look out for a makeup collection this week, in which you can take a look at my tiny collection!

Start the new year right this year by going through your make up stash! As most of us realize, make up has an expiration date. Make up can breed bacteria, even if you’re careful and hygienic when applying.

The chances of you catching some life threatening bacteria are slim, but you can avoid acne, skin irritation, and common infections such as pink eye if you take proper care of what you’re putting on your face. If you haven’t hit your collection up in a while, the new year may be the perfect time to toss questionable items.

Here are some expiration dates to be aware of:

• Powders and shadows: 2 years
• Cream shadows: 12 to 18 months
• Foundation: 1 year
• Lipstick & lipliner: 1 year
• Mascara & eyeliners: 3 months
• Nail polish: 1 to 2 years

Don’t forget to clean your brushes and other make up tools:

• Brushes: Clean weekly using a mild detergent, and spot clean more frequently with brush solution spray
• Sponges: Replace weekly, or buy a re-usable washable sponge. I use this one from Sonia Kashuk as it works well, costs less, and is reusable if you wash it well after each use!

To more easily remember when you bought something, you can write the purchase date on the bottom with a permanent marker. Keep in mind that these numbers apply only to make up and has been opened and used at least once.

You can extend the life of your make up by always using hygenic practices such as washing hands with soap and water before application, using sanitized tools to dip into pots, and using indirect application when possible.

When was the last time you cleaned up your make up? Are you going through it now, and do you have any tips to share?

Image source: 1

I’m not a fashionable person. I wasn’t the girl in high school who had a new, inspiring outfit nearly every day of the week. (Though how I admired her…) I don’t set trends. I only catch the obvious ones just in time before they’re gone. I buy what the mannequins in the store are wearing because I am brainless when it comes to matching articles of clothing.

So it’s not a surprise that I often wake up in the morning, look at all of my clothing options, sigh, scratch my head, and decide to go make coffee in my underwear. Are any of you as overwhelmed with your wardrobe as I am? I can’t be alone!

My wardrobe is fairly small compared to most girls my age. Even so, today I looked in my drawers and I felt hatred towards:

• The cute ruffly shorts I bought and had great ideas for but never wore.
• That shirt I only got to wear a few weeks before a seam ripped.
• Those skirts from my floral phase that lasted a month.
• That one striped shirt that somehow just doesn’t feel comfortable.
• The expensive shirt my mom bought me that had beading…which fell off.

Today I just go so fed up that I dragged out a trash bag and started throwing clothing into it. (It didn’t help that I ran out of coffee this morning either.) It made me realize that we hang on to a lot of clothing we never wear just for silly reasons. That ripped shirt is a shame, but it’s not going to fix itself. Those ruffly shorts don’t go with anything. I’m over my floral phase. I’m never going to wear that uncomfortable shirt even if it’s cute. So I finally tossed them all in a bag, after months of them sitting in the back of my dresser drawer, and they’re heading down to a donations drop-off this weekend. Now that I’ve gotten rid of everything ripped, unwearable, and uncomfortable I don’t have much left. My plan is to slowly build a workable  wardrobe. It also helps to put a limit on how many articles of clothing you should have, so you don’t go over. We always end up wearing our favorites clothes over and over again anyway, right? It’s a waste to keep buying more.

 Benefits of a Small Wardrobe

• You don’t have to do loads and loads of endless laundry.
• You only have things in your closet you actually wear.
• Choosing an outfit is easy because everything is wearable and matches.
• There are limited options, so picking an outfit is easy.
• You don’t have to feel guilty when you buy an article of clothing you actually need.
• You’re wearing what you like and feel comfortable in, so you feel better.
• You don’t have to worry about trends so much.
• You can pick out better quality of clothing. Quality over quantity!
• Everything you clean out can be donated to someone who needs it.

How to Clean Your Closet

• Make three piles: yes, maybe, no. The yes pile is going back into your closet. The maybe pile is for anything you have to even think about keeping.
• Donate. Do some good with those old clothes. Donate the no pile if it’s in good shape.
• Get the maybe pile out of sight. When you’re done, put the maybe pile in a black trash bag or box and put it somewhere you won’t see it every day. Wait about a month and if you end up never going in that maybe pile to grab something then get rid of it all. The trick is not opening it to check “one last time” before saying goodbye. You didn’t need those clothes!
• Organize the closet. When you put everything back try to keep everything neat. If it still looks crammed, you may want to throw some things into the maybe pile.
• Keep it smaller! To keep your closet clutter-free it takes effort. For every one thing you bring in, one thing must go. Otherwise it will snowball and you’ll have to do this all over again!

Going Minimalist

Some people take closet cleaning to extremes by eliminating everything as I have explained but deciding to keep only a tiny amount of clothes. Take a look at Project 333 for example, a group of people who pledge to only wear 33 different articles of clothing for three months. The funny part is that no one is realizing these people are wearing the same 33 things for three months… So really, your fashion choices aren’t really getting as much attention as you think.

Of course, just because you have less clothes doesn’t mean you have to dress boring. There are many fashionable minimalists out there. I love looking around Lookbook and getting inspired. Personally, I think it’s best to have a few good quality clothes and spend your time collecting fun accessories!

Image Credit: ELFA by The Container Store

This week is my last week off before Spring 2010 semester. It is also the beginning of the new year, January 2010. Usually during this time, I clean my life up a bit by establishing new habits and cleaning my room. Well, things worked differently this year. I already picked up the habits I needed at the start of December. I was an avid runner a year ago and a gym enthusiast before that, but I let things slip away and decided to pick it all up again. This is good, I’m glad I did it before the new year.

The other difference is that this year I don’t have a room to clean,  I have an apartment to clean. Half of which (or should I say, a good chunk of) is filled with things that are my dear boyfriend’s. I’ve been preparing for him to realize yes, I will go through his things and get rid of them. (In all honesty, he had so many things that my things just wouldn’t fit. Unacceptable!) But the forewarning was unnecessary, because he knows me by now and probably saw this coming months ago.

Together we went through his DVDs and games. Just these two things, and I was left with about 234234 orders to put up on Amazon.com, and within half an hour 15 items to package and ship out next day. Notice Ein’s glare in this photo. Yes Ein, I do realize how crazy I must have looked frantically packaging these before the post office closed.

And to the right you will see how my desk currently looks like. As someone who likes a clean, empty desk, squeezing my head between stacks of items for sale to use my laptop at my desk is claustrophobic. I’ve since decided to clutter up my beloved bookcase instead.

As you can imagine, the post office guy isn’t too thrilled about my January clean up either. You should have seen his face as I once again went in today with a bag full of items to individually scan and ship. I have since decided to spare him the agony, and hog the self-shipping machine in front of the building.

The funny thing is, we’re not getting a bunch of money out of this. Sure, we are getting a pocketful. But a lot of these movies and games are so old, they only go for a few bucks. Subtract packaging expenses, shipping costs, and Amazon commission and we get…about $2 for some of these. But I figure it’ll add up and maybe we can buy one or two things we’ve been needing to save up for. The true goal here is to de-clutter the apartment. We are slowly succeeding!

I have yet to sell any of the million Rock Band guitars up for sale, nor the drumset. I am not looking forward to fitting those in a box and shipping them, but I also can’t stand the heap of them next to my bookcase.

To close this unnecessarily long entry, I will say this. Orlando is not meant to have 20 to 30 degree weather on a daily basis. Not in November, not in December, and certainly not in January. I don’t see many good things about freezing weather, other than I can finally wear that cute scarf I throw in the back of the closet and the gloves I put god knows where.

But when our entire back door fogs up, I get to draw all over it and have my boyfriend wake up to exclaim, “Marjorie… What the hell did you do to the window?” I guess that’s winter bliss.