Everything in its place, continued

Note: This is an old entry reposted from my old blog called Boudoir Angel on Tumblr. I'm reposting all of these old entries because I plan to delete my old blog and consolidate everything to this one. Some posts may have its text updated and/or reformatted slightly according to the platform change.

Yesterday I posted items from my humble collection of cosmetics--and as I don't have an actual boudoir yet, it shall have to stay that way until we've made space for that somewhere in the house. ^_~

Anyway, my little make-up tool box (shown below, occupying a small corner of my bottom office shelf in front of my anti-stress DVDs)

was inspired by the organizational style of Marlena from Makeup Geek.com, who featured in several YouTube videos how she, as a professional make-up artist, stores and organizes her stash.

Obviously not everyone has/can make/needs as much space as she does after all, Marlena does this professionally, but there are so many gems in this video that she really inspired me to put all my stuff together and get them cleaned up and organised.

These guidelines for organizing cosmetics actually applies to any organizational project:

1. Group items by a common feature, whether its by use, type of product or brand.
2. Use containers that are suited for the products you intend to store. This is most useful if you have an entire collection of products. Uniform containers definitely look neater and more organized than a hodgepodge of different types of containers but if you're going to use different types of containers, selecting ones in the same colour family would tie the collection together.
3. As a matter of personal preference, I tend to choose containers that can stack rather than just lie flat on the counter or shelf. For this, however, you need to be sure of the sizes of the items you place in each container.
4. Label. As much as I often laugh at Martha Stewart for her framed labels, I do actually label a lot of my stuff and my containers. This is most helpful if the containers are not transparent or, like Marlena, you have colours and brands to think about.
5. A place for everything and everything in its place. I'm so guilty of this a lot of the time but you will definitely get farther in your efforts to organise if you also learn to put things back where you got them.

Feel free to comment and show off your own mad skills at organising! ^_^

Originally posted as Boudoir Angel on Tumblr, 19 January 2011