How to KonMari Your Beauty Stash

I've always considered myself sentimental, which is probably why I hoard all sorts of things that I know I’ll never use or need (like tchotchkes I’ve picked up on vacations or the metallic oxfords I spent an entire paycheck on and wore only once). Then there are my beauty products—oh, the beauty products—that took over every other open inch of space in my 600-square-foot NYC apartment, from the linen closet to the living room. My obsession to collect and gather as if I were preparing for Sephora to go out of business the next day was fine when I was the only resident. (After all, 20 glosses for someone who rarely wears anything but lipstick is totally normal, right?) But when my fiancé and I recently decided that he’d move into my apartment, I knew something had to be done when the day arrived and he had no place to store his single bath towel.

When I heard about organization expert Marie Kondo’s best-selling book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tiding Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, I knew it was exactly the drastic change I needed. If you’re not familiar with her method, Kondo shuns popular organizational methods like putting items away in storage for certain seasons, tidying up little by little every day, or—my personal favorite—shoving everything into the back of a closet before guests come over. (OK, she didn’t exactly advocate for the last one, but who hasn’t employed that ever-effective strategy?) Kondo believes that even though these techniques temporarily help, they don’t maintain organization in the long run. As I looked around my apartment with stacks of eyeshadow palettes and a literal stockpile of lipsticks, I guiltily agreed.

Kondo’s feng shui philosophy addresses the mental attachment and emotional baggage that comes with holding onto unnecessary belongings, and encourages following one extreme but fairly simple idea: Keep only the belongings that “spark joy” and get rid of everything else that doesn’t. The process starts off by dumping all your possessions into a single area, then holding up each item in your hands one by one and questioning whether or not it gives your life happiness. The neon eyeliner you swore you’d try but never took out of the box: toss. The overpriced at-home foot spa bath you bought three years ago and used only once: Thank it for the service it played in your life (or for teaching you that you prefer occasionally shelling out for an actual spa session) and let it go.

A true KonMari cleanse demands that you go through every single item in your house—clothes, kitchenware, office supplies, etc.—and identify the things that bring you joy, but for the sake of the experiment, I started with my mammoth pile of beauty products. And as a writer who swims in samples and uses the dishwasher—not the oven, as Carrie Bradshaw did in Sex and the City—for storage, beauty products were 90 percent of the battle. Here’s what I learned as I put Kondo’s suggestions into action:

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It will make you feel nostalgic.

The most important step to Kondo’s technique is to physically pick up each item—not just observe it from a distance—and think about how you’d feel if that piece was no longer in your life. This exercise forcibly confronts you with your past and can sometimes makes you feel like you’re trying to bury the choices—good or bad—that you’ve made. Perhaps that $300 tub of face cream was a splurge after a sizable promotion and it inadvertently marks a pivotal moment in your career. Understandably, it’s hard to throw the moisturizer—and the memories tied to it—out the door (even if it ended up being totally wrong for your skin type). Other times, you could argue you’re thinking about the future. Maybe my future kids will want it. What if this trend makes a comeback? Trust us, there’s a reason that you should regularly dump your cosmetics…and the bacteria attached to them.

Don’t wait around for “one day.”

My just-in-case possessions consisted of a tower of antiaging eye creams my mom might want or a stack of makeup remover packs in case I go on a last-minute vacation. Kondo leaves no room for such excuses. Sure, it’s always good to be prepared, but if you don’t notice them on a day-to-day basis, they’re not trulyneeded. Realistically, my mother takes nearly a year to finish any beauty product, so hoarding backups isn’t necessary. And how many times do I jet off to St. Lucia on a whim?

Forget fancy storage containers.

A few minutes on Pinterest will easily convince you that you need a 10-tier polish rack worthy of a nail salon, but Kondo rejects buying extra storage—a huge disappointment for someone like me who can get lost in the aisles of The Container Store. “A booby trap lies within the term ‘storage,’” she writes in her book. “I can honestly declare that storage methods do not solve the problem of how to get rid of clutter. In the end, they are only a superficial answer.” Kondo suggests that your bathroom shelves, empty containers, and shoeboxes (stored on their side for easy access) are all you need when it comes to decluttering your beauty products.

Be mindful of your schedule.

Organizing my beauty stash took a little more than six hours. In other words, if you’re applying Kondo’s principles to all of your belongings, or if you live in a larger home, you’ll want to carve out a decent chunk of time. Kondo claims the entire process can take a few hours to a few months, which sounds overwhelming and exhausting, but she says she’s never had a client relapse back into messiness once they’ve completed the process. Tidying up once and never needing to do it again? It could be worth sacrificing a weekend.

You’ll question your “joy sparking” moments.

As a writer who makes a living finding the joy in hair and makeup products, the KonMari process was even more difficult than for your typical beauty obsessive. I spent a full five minutes pondering the joy-giving powers of an empty bottle ofShu Uemura x Karl Lagerfeld face wash that features a drawing of the adorable Choupette. And Kondo assures us that sometimes the things that spark joy won’t always make sense. There’s an anecdote in her book about how she holds on to a T-shirt she got at a Japanese expo more than a decade ago. The shirt features the face of Kiccoro, a green, furry cartoon character that was one of the expo’s mascots. Kondo talks about how it’s the one thing in her home that she can’t bring herself to part with, even if people ridicule her about it. She believes, however, “these are the types of things you should hang on to. If you can say without a doubt, ‘I really like this!’ no matter what anyone else says, and if you like yourself for having it, then ignore what other people think.”

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