4 Minimalist Beauty Hacks

In today’s post I share 4 minimalist beauty hacks to show you how you can repurpose, reuse or multi-use beauty products instead of throwing them out and buying more stuff.

1. Use your old lipstick as blush

When my blush slipped out of my hands and its casing and content shattered at brutal impact from the hard tile floor of the bathroom, my instant reaction (well, after cursing ever so slightly and cleaning up the brilliant mess I made, that is) was to search for and purchase a new one. It’s the general way of things, is it not, to replace something frequently used when it’s either empty or broken?

But of course, and how typical, the blush fell down and broke just as I was going to apply it to my cheeks, and I remembered the old trick of dabbing some lipstick onto the cheekbones and smudging it down to a suitable blush-like color. It just so happened that I had an old, bright red lipstick laying around that I hadn’t used in ages, and while being in the midst of my decluttering process I had been meaning to toss it out.

Well, to make a long story short, I threw out my broken blush, kept the lipstick, and it seems like the lipstick is going to fulfill its duty as blush a pretty good while, saving me the need of having to buy a new blush any time soon

2. Use your old hair conditioner as shaving cream

When first decluttering beauty and bathroom products, many of us will find that we either have too many bottles of one product or that we want to ditch a product we use altogether. I don’t remember exactly what the deal was for me, but I think I was going “water only” or “no ‘poo” on my hair at the time, so I guess my conditioner seemed like a superfluous product. I have to admit, although I shave my legs in the shower, using shaving cream is something I constantly find myself skipping (I don’t keep any shaving cream at hand either, so what’s there to use?). This results in pretty dry legs, to be honest, especially in winter time.

So, I was faced dilemma of being short of one shaving cream (a shaving cream I really had no interest in buying in the first place) to save my paper-dry legs, and being stuck with a bottle hair conditioner that I had no use for. It dawned on me that conditioners make things soft, so to use up my hair conditioner, I started applying it to my legs upon shaving. Worked like a charm! No need to buy shaving cream and neither did any conditioner go to waste.

3. Use your spare hand lotion as body lotion

I don’t know about you, but in my decluttering and minimizing process, hand lotions are one of the things I always seem to have too many of, and, at the same time, a hard time letting go of. My hands doubles as sandpaper in the winter, after all. Never mind that I am the laziest hand care person, and I particularly hate applying lotions and creams to my hands (buying the hand lotions, on the other hand…). Even so, I knew I shouldbe using them, and hence throwing them out seems like a waste.

In my minimalist heart of hearts, though, I would like my beauty product collection to consist of no more than onetube of hand lotion, and thus some of the tubes and bottles don’t seem to empty fast enough. What didrun out, and needed replacing, was my body lotion. So, I figured, is it good enough for my hands, it’s good enough for my body. And as such, I started using one of my hand creams as body lotion to remedy dry legs after shaving. It turns out I’m no better at using body lotion than I am at using hand creams, so my collection of hand lotions is still going strong. But, who’s not to say you might have better luck with it?

The idea is, simply put, to use your hand lotion as body lotion, instead of throwing out a tube just to go out and buy another.

4. Let your eye shadow double as brow color

I don’t just repurpose old stuff so that I don’t have to buy new or throw out. Sometimes I also take note to see if it’s possible that a product I already use can function multiple ways. This way, I don’t have to keep as many products in my bathroom cabinets.

Being strawberry blonde, I am “graced” with the palest, most invisible eye lashes and eyebrows. Even if I try to get used to wearing less makeup and accepting myself the way I am, invisible lashes and brows to boot, I do like to give my eyebrows some color. My favorite way is to dye them with my hubby’s beard dye, but when I’m lazy or the color is fading, and I can’t be bothered to dye them, I color them in when I do the rest of my makeup.

To color my brows, I use plain ol’ eyeshadow. I dip the pencil in water, dab the pencil into the eyeshadow, and fill my brows with color. I only use eyeshadow on rare occasions, but having my eyeshadow do double duty both for lids and brows, there’s one less item on my makeup shelf. Eyebrow pencils don’t double that well for eyeshadow, I find!

I am always on the lookout for more multipurpose beauty products to save space in my bathroom cabinets. Do you use any multipurpose products that you’re happy with, or have any other minimalist beauty hacks to make the most of your beauty products? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!