I know, I know. I just posted about makeup decluttering and here I am, showing stuff I’m adding to my hoard. Never did I once say that I wasn’t shopping anymore! (I was just making room? 😆 ) And, I didn’t go as crazy this year with post-holiday sales.
This is called self control in my books! 😉
You may recall that the primary objective of this blog originally was to reduce my beauty stash. 
I had a three-pronged plan:
A) Stop buying more (No-Buy / Low-Buy)
B) Use up what I have (empties aka Trash Stash)
C) Get rid of items that I no longer use (Purges / declutters)
This post is focused on plan of attack C! I’ve been meaning to post this since early 2017 for “Spring cleaning”, but never got my act together to gather all of the items. No time like now, right? 😉 This post will mainly consist of photos and product names listed out. It would take too long to provide a description of every single item with an explanation why it is being decluttered. Just look:
Hold onto your hats!
It’s been a while since I last did an update on my shopping accountability – the last one was way back in August, actually! That was to cover June and July spending, so that means I haven’t talked about how August to October went. Those 3 months were my No-Buys months, in preparation for Holiday spending. I’m pleased to report that those 3 months I was too busy to think about makeup. At first I was missing the shopping but I got used to it – I even went to a L’Oreal warehouse and walked away with just bar soap:
I got 4 bars of the Kiehl’s Gently Exfoliating Body Scrub Soap in Coriander. It’s the Limited edition by Kate Moross, which is from this year, it seems? One is already in use, as you can see. I paid $8 each for these.
So a pat on the back for me! 😀 But, we’re here to talk about November! I essentially did all of my shopping concentrated between the Sephora sale and Black Friday. In addition, I picked up random bits. A LOT of random bits:
There were just so many deals to be had… how could I resist? 😇
When I look at it all together like this, I think I got a bit carried away with makeup hauling…
But when you pick up a little bit here, a little bit there, it doesn’t seem like it’s that much! 😉 I wasn’t able to go on actual Boxing Day to shop but many of the deals are available for the whole month of January – basically when stores sell out of stuff is when the sales end! 😛
I had anticipated April would have been a crazy month of haulage due to the Sephora VIB sale but that didn’t turn out to be the case. I had $252.74 in my April budget to start off with.
In the Sephora sale, I bought only 4 items, and I ended up returning one of them:
My original total was $83.30 but after returning the busted BITE Beauty Agave Lip Mask, I only ended up spending only $52.70 at the VIB sale.
I received a notification that there was a parcel waiting for me and I just knew it was the prize from MyStyleInsideOut‘s giveaway!
I was only expecting the BH Cosmetics Carli Bybel Eyeshadow and Highlighter Palette as per her giveaway post, but she included extras! 😀 And she wrote a sweet message in that butterfly notecard! ❤
This has been a long time coming. I just needed to set some time aside and be in the right mood to be serious about getting rid of some items from my stash. Sometimes I feel a bit attached to items due to nostalgia and I talk myself into keeping stuff I really shouldn’t. I think I did well:
Since I’ve been hauling like a madwoman, it’s only fair to purge some stuff too! Tomorrow I’ll be purging some lip products. Let’s have a closer look at the foundation and concealer purge pile:
By now you’re sick of my hauls, right? I’m sorry, but you realize January was NO HOLDS BARRED month, and I just came off a yearlong dry spell, so every makeup item looked mighty tempting. This is the LAST of the January hauls (until I receive the items I ordered online). Here are some random bits and pieces I picked up that I haven’t covered in my previous posts:
I mentioned in my blogiversary post that I feel one of the strengths of the blog is that I’m able to do comparisons between various products due to my stash. Here are some highlights of those comparison posts (I just remembered that I even did a week-long series called “Comparison Week” ha!):
Breathless vs Breathless
This polish should really be renamed to “Bait and Switch” because it’s some shady business going on here! Firstly, I spied this polish in a random dusty Guardian Pharmacy on the bottom shelve behind some Revlon polishes. It was covered with a fine layer of dust but I was quite pleased with myself for finding a Milani nail polish since Milani isn’t readily available here. I think the lady at the cash was surprised someone wanted to buy this polish – it’s likely sat on the shelves for 4 years since the Neon collection were released in 2010 (I bought this polish last year). There were a few Neon shades in the display but the vibrant purple colour called “Rad Purple” drew me in:
The important thing to note about this polish bottle is that it is opaque, which I didn’t even notice until I got home and opened the bottle. Now for the bait and swatch…
stash matters 