Using The Useless

You all know by now that I'm somewhat of a pack rat.  I hate throwing things away - I always think that one day, this one useless item will once again be useful in my life. 

I've recently been addicted to buying makeup and as a result, I've had to deal with the issue of how to store everything on top or within my vanity.  Having already spent my money on the makeup, I wasn't about to spend even more just to store/organize all of it and so I dug up some of the things I had been hoarding and put them to good use.


When you buy new sunglasses, many will come with a box in addition to the actual carrying case.  Here is one of my Tom Ford boxes from a few years ago:

Pretty much useless unless you open it up and use it to hold all of your makeup palettes!!

And to think I almost spent $5 at Target for one of their storage shelves!  Hah.


I like to store all of my lip glosses standing upright bc when they're on their sides, the gloss can often times leak out from the cap and you end up with a sticky mess.  I didn't have enough surface area on my vanity for all of my lip glosses and so once again, useless items from the past came out to save the day.

Old potpourri jar:

New lip gloss holder:

And for the few that didn't fit into the potpourri jar:

Nice and neat, just the way I like it.  In my defense, I didn't keep this empty jar of Philosophy Booster Caps in hopes that it would one day become useful again.  It just so happened that on the day that I finished this jar of Booster Caps, I was also organizing my lip glosses.  Okay, I'm actually laughing out loud right now.


When we first got our espresso machine, my mom bought an adorable set of espresso cups and saucers to go with it.  The cups and saucers went into our cabinets and we were left with an empty box:

Which just so happened to be the perfect container for my NYX pigments:

Since we're on the subject of using useless items, I would like to take a moment to talk about what to do with makeup that you have no use for.  Half of the colors in this box, I would never use as eyeshadow but did you know you can use pigments as nail polish, lip color, and blush??  You can also use lipstick as cream bases for your eyeshadow.


Finally, cookies, pastries, candy, etc often come with insane packaging.  Packaging almost as good as the goodies inside.

This pretty tin box was originally from a pack of Chinese pastries my parents bought last year.  Once the pastries were consumed, I gave the boxes a quick rinse and now use them to store jewelry and of course, makeup.

I know all of the examples I gave in this post pertain to storage but hopefully this inspires you to make the most of everything you own :)  Use what you've already spent in order to save from spending again.  Of course, this concept doesn't really translate well when it comes to shoes and purses ^_^