Cleaning Out My Lip Product Drawer | My Beauty Picks

First let's start off with some background and disclaimers. I've been only wearing beauty products since I was 20/21, and for the first two years I only dabbled in lip products: mostly colored lip balms & lip glosses. Then I discovered my love of lipsticks in the autumn of 2012 and I quickly built up a collection of pink & berry toned lipsticks all from the drugstore. Then I decided to be brave, and discover the red lipstick that would work for me in 2013 -- the year of finding the perfect red lipstick for me. Since then I've received some lip products to try out from various companies, I also receive lip products in subscription boxes, and also I typically never pay full-price for any of my makeup (coupons, clearance racks, and sales are my best friend).

So, since I'm a lip product junkie, I will have a good number of products in my collection. I know that not everyone needs to have this much personally, and I'm not trying to brag either. I'm just sharing something that I love with y'all! :)

For awhile this summer I had my lip products organized by color, but that just wasn't working with the space I had in my Alex-9 Drawers, especially since I wanted to keep them all in one drawer without having to buy any other storage. Soo...last Wednesday afternoon I pulled everything out & sorted everything by type: lipsticks, lip glosses, chubby sticks, colored/tinted balms, squeeze lip glosses, lip stains, lip pencils, and lip gloss pens. (As pictured in the above picture.)

After everything was sorted by type, it was time to swatch everything to see what I really wanted to keep. To say the least, that was rather fun. In the above picture you can see all of my lipsticks swatched on my arm. After I would swatch a color, I would think and decided if I would really wear it in the coming months. Surprisingly, I only got rid of 6 lipsticks: but mostly because either the color doesn't look good on me, I've never worn it (worn only once), or just didn't like how a lipstick looked on me. I'm surprised I didn't get rid of more, but when it really comes down to it, I honestly do wear all of the others at one point or another. Plus some of the lipsticks are more my spring/summer ones, whilst others are my favorites to wear during the autumn/winter months.

Here are all of my chubby type sticks swatched on my arm. These are my favorites to wear when I'm going out, because most of them leave a staining affect on the lips. I only tossed two of these out: one because I wasn't a huge fan of the formula (one of the reds), and the other because the color looked awful on me (furthest on the right).

I don't have pictures of my lip glosses or balms swatched, since the camera died on me. Also, I didn't swatch my lip stains or lip pencils, because I already know that I use them all the time. In the end though, I did get rid of twelve lip products, which for me is big step. Plus there is one upside to having so much in ones collection, you can easily have what you need for doing someone else's makeup. For example: I'm going to be doing a friends makeup for her wedding this Saturday and because I have a wide range of colors & products, she doesn't need to buy anything for her makeup look. So, I can easily be a makeup artist when needed for my friends.

I'm really happy with the finished look, which is pictured above. Like I've said before, I use the IKEA Alex 9-drawer for makeup/nail polish/and other random stuff (along with my sister, Hanne-col who has a drawer). For storage within the drawer I used old subscription boxes: Beauty Army is the covered pink box in the front (on the left), Birchbox (brown box in the back left corner), and GlossyBox (pink box on the right). I also placed the boxes within the drawer to give me little squares for more things, since I didn't have enough boxes that fit inside the drawer.

I now have all my lipsticks organized by brand within in one box, along with lip pencils. All colored/tinted balms (tube & tubs) are in box together, and my chubby sticks are in a cubby hole next to them. In the covered pink box I have all my lip glosses, while in the cubby hole next to it are all my: lip gloss sticks (e.l.f & Stila), squeeze lip glosses, and lip stains.

I think the current arrangement will work out lovely right now for me. Of course, I know that I have more lip products then the average person, but I find that when I'm running a YouTube beauty channel and that I like to talk about beauty on my blog, it is helpful to try out many brands and products to discover the hidden gems to share with y'all.

Oh, if you would like a review of any of the products pictured in this post, do let me know.

~Ashley