How To Avoid Overpacking Makeup

When I’m going over to a friend’s house overnight I’m usually hauling a bunch of makeup. My friends are just as much into makeup as I am and usually the highlight of my weekend is getting ready with them and talking about our favorite products and youtubers.  Usually I’m going full out glam when I am with them, which involves bringing a ton of products along to use.  The other day my friend had the brilliant idea of making a spreadsheet of all of the products she was taking on vacation.

Usually I just write down all the products I am going to bring on a piece of paper and pack them up that way, but I liked the idea of being able to reuse a spreadsheet.  I came up with my own version by thinking of the steps I do in my makeup routine, then adding a product to each one. Check out the PDF of my version: Makeup Packing Checklist

This will be so helpful moving forward because if I stick to just having one product per step, I’m going to be packing WAY less than usual.  Even more importantly, I won’t be forgetting anything. Last weekend I annoyingly forgot to bring liquid liner to do my makeup when I was out at a friend’s place and it completely changed my look.

On my spreadsheet I added the brushes I need to correspond with each step to do my face. I ALWAYS tend to forget certain brushes I need for foundation, powder, etc.  Face brushes take up a lot of space so it is important to not overpack them either.  I didn’t add a column for eye brushes because I can usually just grab a handful of them from my brush holder to bring along and be covered without taking up much room. There are way more of these and I also don’t know the names to actually list them off, but I can grab a few by eyeballing them pretty easily.  I use the Morphe Brush Case for traveling.

This checklist technique would be great for plane travel to save room in a suitcase.  Makeup usually fills up my suitcase just as much as clothes and shoes, so I think this will help me out.  It can get really overwhelming being a high maintenance person when it comes to packing.  If you feel like making your own, you could also add other personal care categories like skincare, hair products, etc. that you don’t want to forget and the best part is it’s reusable for future trips!

I wanted to mention a product good for traveling with that I recently received as a free sample. I see a lot of Youtubers mentioning Evian spray. I’m a big fan of other setting sprays but always thought Evian was a ridiculous overpriced bottle of water. I have brought it with me a few times on overnight trips since getting it and wanted have formed an opinion on it. The first time I used it was when I went camping last month.  Instead of using it as a makeup product, it was nice to bring along to wet my toothbrush when I was in the wilderness instead of pouring out my water bottle.  I also used it to wet my skin before going in with a makeup wipe to give it some extra help. Doing this allowed me to use less makeup wipes! It usually takes about three wipes to really feel like my face is clean.  Nothing beats washing my face with warm water at a real sink with Philosophy Purity cleanser, but it was good enough for camping one night.

I’ve also used it to re-dampen my makeup sponge. I usually go over my face with a wet sponge after I complete my face to blend everything a bit better, and using the Evian spray to do this step was nice so that I wasn’t wasting my more expensive setting sprays or going to the sink again to run more water.  The last way I’ve tried it is to wet makeup brushes for applying shimmery shades and also for spot cleaning. It’s definitely just glorified water and nothing miracle- making, but I have to say the spray comes out VERY fine and not too strong and is one of the best mists I’ve used. I’m not sure yet if I will repurchase this when I run out of my bottle, but it’s a nice tool to have on my vanity. OK and is it weird to anyone else that “Evian” is “Naive” spelled backward? Very strange and kind of freaked me out…

I hope this helped anyone else out there like me that has trouble over packing beauty products!

-Kim