I’m starting what will probably be a long process of decluttering. I’ve been thinking of doing this for over a month now and haven’t made much progress because it can get overwhelming and can be difficult to make decisions. To start, I set aside items that I’m considering getting rid of. This is what is in the four boxes that are sitting in front of my cabinets. I think it can help to do this if you have the space to store stuff temporarily.
If you want to see my collection as it currently is, you’ll find that in this video:
Here are some questions I’m asking myself to help me along:
Why am I decluttering? What are my goals?
The most important things to me are to make my room feel less cramped and increase my desk space. This room is being used as both a bedroom and an office and space is limited. I have 4 9-drawer Alex cabinets from Ikea and most of the drawers are filled with beauty stuff. I would like to use some of that drawer space to store other types of stuff, like office supplies, camera gear, and miscellaneous tech stuff. I have these kinds of things sitting in shelves and it would be nice to reduce the visual clutter.
Another major reason is that I’ve somehow lost the enjoyment in using makeup for anything other than as a creative outlet. I think the main thing that caused this was turning my hobby into an attempt to make an income and the excesses that came along with that. The amount of makeup and general beauty stuff I have has gotten to a point where there is no way I can use all of it. I want to know that I love everything I have and it all has a purpose. Somewhat of the Marie Kondo philosophy of “does it bring me joy?”
How do I plan to use my collection? How will I make decisions?
I’ve already mentioned using it as a creative outlet but I would like to see if I can actually enjoy using makeup for beauty purposes again. I’m interested in keeping the best quality of items that are similar plus items that are unique and will give me greater diversity in what I can create. For example, instead of having 10 eyeshadow palettes that all have similar shades and not really knowing which are my faves of the bunch, wouldn’t it be better to just have 1 or 2 that I’m 100% sure I love? It would cause me less mental fatigue making decisions on what to use.
Having a blog has changed the way I place value on certain products. It used to be that I’d only really care about the quality. It’s unavoidable to also look at how relevant a product is and factor that into whether I should feature it in a post (meaning, also using it and wearing it). I’m kind of sick and tired of that. So, in part of deciding what should stay and what should go, less emphasis should be made on how “relevant” a product is for search results, as tempting as this quality may be. How much I like it and how well it works should be the most important things to consider.
As far as what method I will use to go through all the products, I don’t have a set strategy. In the past, I’ve done declutters that were more quick and ruthless, making decisions based on somewhat distant memories of how the products worked. This is much more efficient but I don’t want to do it that way this time, at least not as my initial method. I may go back to this later on if I’m finding what I try is not working.
Another method of making decisions, a slow one, is trying the items again, one by one. Picking several products from the same category and wearing a different one each day is something I’ve done before and found helped me notice details about them that I may have missed if I kept wearing the same one day after day. There are so many things I haven’t worn in a very long time and I don’t even remember how I feel about them. This is the method I’m going to try starting with. It may get too tedious, we shall see.
Is there anything I am not using and have no interest in using anymore?
This question is how I ended up with 4 boxes of stuff set aside. I asked myself this to quickly make space when I was first putting stuff away in the drawers. Four of the drawers were filled with fragrances, which is too significant considering I hardly ever wear them. I enjoy fragrance but they can trigger migraines, so I started to avoid them.
I had a whole drawer for nail polishes which I also never wear because I don’t like sitting around waiting for nail polish to dry. And it always chips after a day or two. Not worth it.
If you look at the initial choices I made for the eye and cheek products, you can probably tell that I factored relevance into the decisions. I know this is a problem and it is part of why I want to give these things another try.
I don’t know how this process is going to go but I hope that by the end of it I can can give you some insights from my own experience.