The Beauty Spotlight Team has been taking turns sharing our makeup storage solutions with you over the past few months and this week it’s my turn!
Be prepared for a very pic heavy post. You’ll probably be surprised to hear that I just went through absolutely everything I have to try and cull my collection a bit.
If you would like any more details on anything you see just let me know in the comments.
My makeup is stored in my office/beauty room. Please forgive the totally barren decor. I recently painted and haven’t got around to decorating it yet. I have a long (78″) Ikea LINNMON/ADILS white table. The right side is my computer/office area and the left side is my vanity area.
I created an L shape on the left side with my short/wide 6 drawer Ikea ALEX. All of my makeup is stored in that ALEX along with several acrylic organizers on the desk surface and ALEX surface. So let’s get into it!
First lets take a look inside the 6 drawers of my Ikea ALEX. I adore the ALEX units but it makes me mental that there is so, so much wasted space at the back of the drawers because they don’t pull out all the way.
I actually was looking for hacks for getting them to open further and started messing around with the fifth drawer down and even though I chickened out on going through with the hack, after I put the drawer back together again it is now pulling out further. YES! I’ll have to take a closer look to see what I did because I want to do it to them all now. Let me know if your interested in details.
In the first drawer I have all of my setting powders and contour products.
In the second drawer I store all of my bronzers, along with some face palettes, a couple random out of place highlighters, and my Too Faced Love Flush Blush palette.
In the third drawer on the right I keep my four Urban Decay Naked Palettes, other eyeshadow palettes from Too Faced, Tarte, Smashbox, NARS, Laura Mercier, Marc Jacobs, etc.
On the left I have a bunch of eyeshadow singles, duos, and some trios from NARS, Dior, Burberry, Hourglass, Kat Von D, Marc Jacobs, and more.
In the fourth drawer we have even more eyeshadows. Yes I have a bit of a problem! On the right we have palettes again. Some Urban Decay Vice palettes and Alice Through the Looking Glass palette, MAKE UP FOR EVER Artist Shadow palettes, Urban Decay singles palette, Too Faced Peanut Butter and Jelly, Cle de Peau Lise Watier, Lancome, some NUDESTIX all jammed into two tins, and more.
On the far right are my beloved Le Metier de Beauté Kaleidoscopes. On the left we have a bunch of eyeshadow quads and smaller palettes from Dior, YSL, Giorgio Armani, Charlotte Tilbury, BECCA, Guerlain, Kat Von D, Lise Watier, shu uemura, and more. I also have my Stila Perfect Me, Perfect Hue Eye and Cheek palette in there.
The fifth drawer has all my lipsticks that I wear less often. So all the brights, reds, and vampy shades that I don’t turn to often along with a lot of more everyday shades that just didn’t fit in my other lipstick storage unit along with oddly shaped ones that didn’t fit in it either. It is a giant disaster at the moment.
I used to have all my lipsticks organized by brand because it looks pretty but I decided to organize it more by shade this time. Right now it is kind of organized by colour family but things got a little mixed around and I need to do a better job!
The final drawer holds the stuff with no home at the moment. I have all the lipgloss shades that I need to decide whether I want to part with. Deep vampy ones, and red ones etc. that are beautiful but I’m not likely to wear. There are also all my liquid lipsticks because I don’t think I’ll ever wear them. I’m just not a fan of the crazy drying look of the new liquid lipsticks. I also have all my Too Faced Melted Lipsticks and Benefit glosses here because they just didn’t fit anywhere else.
My three INGLOT 20 pan palettes are stacked in here along with my giant Artis 10 brush and a bunch of fat handled and double ended makeup brushes that I just don’t know how to store! There is also a little storage container with some cream shadows and tubes of cream blushes from shu uemura that I haven’t found a home for yet.
It’s all a work in progress!
Now lets take a look at my various acrylic storage units and what they store. First up is the little corner at the end of my desk.
I have my MelodySusie Acrylic Large Makeup Organizer ($49.99 US) set up there. I love this thing because it actually transforms into two or three makeup organizers!
At the back of my desk I have it with the removable top organizer resting on top. The top stores my foundation primers, setting sprays, and a few foundations.
The drawer unit has two small shallow drawers on top, a wide shallow drawer in the middle, and a deeper wide drawer on the bottom.
The small drawer on the left stores some eyeshadow primers and the drawer on the right is currently empty. I’m still figuring things out since my storage overhaul!
The middle drawer has my Rouge Bunny Rouge Loose Glitter Pigments and Dior Fluid Shadows along with a couple of my most used cream eyeshadows including my MAC Painterly Paint Pot which I use almost daily.
The bottom drawer has some of my favorite small, sleek eyeshadow palettes. All my shu uemura eyeshadow palettes, my smaller MAKE UP FOR EVER eyeshadow palettes, an Hourglass Modernist eyeshadow palette, and my Urban Decay Naked Basics palettes.
The bottom drawer of the MelodySusie organizer has a divided acrylic organizer that you can use as a drawer organizer or pull out, as I have, to use as it’s own organizer. Mine is on the left side of my desk filled with foundations.
I still need to go through these foundations again and pull out the ones that don’t really work for me, shade wise and formula wise, and stop hoarding foundations! I still have a small tote container filled with a bunch more. I like having them on hand for shade comparisons etc. but I have far too many out in my day to day collection that don’t suit me at all.
In the back left corner of my desk is my newest makeup storage acquisition. I am in love with this baby! I saw it on YouTube and new I had to order one for myself right away. It is the Lux Box Deluxe Lip Stand with 3 Drawers ($109.99 US).
This spinning lipstick tower is AMAZING! It has 84 lipstick slots along with 3 drawers and four compartments on the ends.
The 84 lipstick slots (split up front and back) hold the lipsticks shades I wear most often. This is mostly nudes and softer shades. The three drawers hold lip glosses, as do the compartments on the one end. The compartments on the other end hold my lip liners.
I put an acrylic lipstick holder on the top of the unit that has some of my Dior lipglosses and YSL Glossy Stains because I didn’t really have anywhere else to put it. It think it looks nice teetering up there!
Now let’s take a look at the acrylic units I have on top of my Ikea ALEX.
The far left is my Original Beauty Box Deluxe Beauty Box ($129 US). I love this organizer because of the nice deep drawers it has.
The top drawer is very shallow and I’m not sure what to put in it so I’ve just thrown some Chanel and Guerlain eyeshadow palettes in there for now. I use to store eyeshadow primers, tweezer, lash comb, spare lash curler pads etc. in there but I also had stuff stacked on stuff to hide it. Now that it’s visible I need to fill it with prettier things! You get me right?
The second drawer has most of my highlighters. There is a lot of variety from Chanel, BECCA, Dior, Lancome, Giorgio Armani, MAC, Urban Decay, and more.
The next drawer is full of blushes from MAC, Charlotte Tilbury, Burberry, Too Faced, Guerlain, smaller blush palettes, my Illamasqua Hydra Veil Primer, and some cusion foundations.
The next drawer has even more blushes. My Benefit boxed blushes, Clinique Cheek Pops, NARS, Urban Decay, MAC, Rouge Bunny Rouge, Dior Cheek Sticks, and more.
The bottom deepest drawer is full of even more blushes. I know, I know. These are all stored on their side since this drawer is so nice and deep. It is full of mostly my Chanel Joues Contraste blush collection, along with Dior, Illamasqua, Lancome, Le Metier de Beauté, Hourglass, and more.
On the right are my two MUJI 5 drawer units. These are nice because they have five equal sized more shallow drawers.
The top drawer is my mascara drawer.
The second drawer is my brow drawer.
The next drawer is my concealer drawer.
Then my neutral eyeliner drawer.
Followed by my more colourful eyeliners.
The first drawer on the next unit has Colourpop Super Shock Shadows and Giorgio Armani Eyes to Kill eyeshadows, and some gel eyeliners.
Then a full drawer of more Colourpop eyeshadows.
Next is a drawer full of cream eyeshadow sticks. (Which I never use, yet this is the narrowed down collection. I need help!) There are a few eyeliners in there too.
The next drawer is cream eyeshadows and eyeshadow singles. Mostly Dior, L’Oreal, and Urban Decay.
Then while taking pictures I realized that during my storage overhaul I left the bottom drawer empty. Sweet! Room to grow. Haha just kidding. I don’t need more! I just threw in the two Urban Decay Gwen Stefani Palettes in there that were on top of the unit. Still sitting on top of the drawers are my MAC 30 pan palette and Benefit Cheekathon Blush Palette.
In between the Beauty Box and MUJI drawers I have all my Kat Von D eyeshadow palettes and Z-Palettes. The Z-Palettes contain all my depoted Rouge Bunny Rouge and Le Metier de Beauté eyeshadows.
These are still some of my favourites and my passion for them was part of what spawned the birth of this blog. There are also a couple Z-Palettes full of depoted Dior Quints and then some random stuff.
My nail polishes are stored in an IKEA Helmer to the right of my desk as well as on this amazing double tiered shelf nail rack. I have yet to fill it back up since painting. I need to seriously cull that collection as well first!
My brushes are still kept in my Kikki K canisters that I love.
Phew! Well I think I covered it all. Congrats if you made it all the way through this! I still have work to do in here and can’t wait to show you the final decorated result. I also need to figure out where to put a couple random things like my eyelash curler and BeautyBlender!
Let me know what storage habits we share or if anything here caught your eye in the comments below.
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