Latest Attempt at Organization

You may recall a few months ago, I offered some advice on She Knows about how to best organize your make-up for spring.

My advice (I hope) was quite helpful.

Organizing make-up is one of the top 10 questions people ask me about. Sometimes I wonder how people find it possible to be incapable of organizing 1 blush, 2 shadows, a bronzer and a concealer?! That’s NOTHING compared to what a make-up artist is dealing with. Imagine, if you and all your girlfriends got together with your make-up…Then multiply that by 10 and maybe you’ll come close to the amount of product I have to work with.

But, even the best of us have our moments of chaos and with all of the product also comes some serious potential for disorder. It’s bound to happen when you have enough make-up for AT LEAST a dozen people. I don’t even have enough closet space for all of my products and equipment, and subsequently have been forced to use a kitchen cabinet for storage.

Here is an example of what is going on in my apartment:

This isn’t even everything. This is just what I managed to condense and separate. There is a bunch of random make-up in my bedroom closet in a stackable drawer. But, that’s a project for a different day, because after spending 5 HOURS getting all of this together I have no desire to tackle anything else (At least not this week).

Anyway…Here are my current favorites packed and ready to go in the train case I use most often for jobs:

Under the airbrush make-up in the main compartment are 6 or 7 palettes of shadows and blush. I try to use pallets whenever I can, and I also tend to favor loose powders and pigments because multi-purpose products help a lot when you’re trying to travel light. I can use loose powders as shadow or blush, and if you mix them with the appropriate bases you can create custom lip colors and glosses.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to travel light. I haven’t had success with rolling cases in the past. I find them to be clumsy and they often lead to broken products from being dragged all over. Instead, I suffer and carry my case on my shoulder. I will no doubt have back problems later in life – But, until I come up with a better and safer alternative – This is pretty much what I’m working with. Unfortunately I end up looking like a bruised and battered child after working for several days in a row.

This is my shoulder. It looks better now. It was raw just a few days ago…Today is appears to be healing:

OK, so…now you understand the importance of purging and cutting the fat from my kit. Less is more if you can figure out which products can work in multiple ways for you.

But, what about the extras? All the stuff that isn’t a favorite? Or, what about the equipment?

Some things I need. And, I may not need them on every job – But, I still need to have them on the random chance that a job might call for something that strays from my usual arsenal. In the past I would keep everything loose in my cabinet – This is a system that doesn’t exactly work well when you’re in a rush. I found it hard to locate things at the last minute, so I started thinking of a better way to sort things out.

In the end, zip lock bags seemed to be the best solution. I can see everything, and have each bag clearly labeled with it’s contents. Here are some of the bags:

Now, to save even more space I’ve gotten one of those HUGE zip lock bags, and put all of the clearly labeled baby zip locks inside of it.

Much better! I imagine this system would work well for anyone, even with a much smaller collection of products.

Why bother investing in a more expensive organizational system when you can use zip lock bags instead?