Organizing Your Beauty Products

It's easy to let our beauty stations get super messy when we're using the same products every day. We grab them, toss them down and run out the door. But now that you are not going out as often and are maybe not going through your full routine every day, you can take some time to get yourself all organized. Start one step at a time, and eventually, you will have a whole new vanity! See how Allure writer Lauren Caruso had her bathroom completely transformed in The Ultimate Guide to Organizing Your Beauty Products.

Ugh, spring cleaning. That about sums up our sentiment toward a seasonally specific mandate to go through all the stuff that's been collecting dust since the last time you swore you'd get rid of it (a.k.a. January 1). And when you're a beauty editor, all that stuff quadruples: Night creams magically find a home in your desk drawer, lipsticks take up most of the real estate on your vanity, and sheet masks take the place of actual documents in your filing cabinets. (Hard life, we know.) We called upon Homepolish, a company of by-the-hour interior designers who are basically small-space masters, to help us organize our beauty products, among other things.

Homepolish designer Megan Hopp is the real deal: She came into my tiny (I'm talking 400-square-feet, is-this-even-legally-an-apartment-tiny) West Village space without judgment. I share the two-bedroom apartment with my roommate who, thank goodness, owns exactly two beauty products (toothpaste and deodorant), so we don't exactly compete for space in the medicine cabinet.

While I try to keep everything clean—towels stacked, beauty products in their place, nothing was really nice to look at. Couple that with some heat tools that haven't been unplugged since the day I moved in, and it was a recipe for disaster. The first order of business: Take everything out. "To set yourself up for success in organizing it's important to begin with a clean palette, meaning every last thing must be removed from the drawers, countertops, and cupboards prior to executing a new and improved strategy," says Hopp. The hardest part of this entire process was watching Hopp unload and lay out on the floor hundreds of beauty products that had been semiorganized using my incredibly unscientific method called "remembering where everything is."