For those of us who do not have the luxury of an Ikea in their area, makeup storage can be a challenge. While my makeup storage woes would easily be fixed by an Ikea Alex drawer unit or the newly reinstated Fira/Moppe unit, I have had to look for other solutions. Knowing that I would be moving in a few months and that I did not want to store my makeup in the bathroom for humidity reasons, I started scouring the stores for a small, non-plastic, drawer unit. Eureka struck when I saw craft storage units at Michaels.
As you can see here at the bottom here, my mini storage is comprised of three boxes. The top compartment was sold on its own, and the other two were sold together. They were quite inexpensive at 20$or 25$ (Michaels often has a 40% or 50% these - wait for the sale!). When I put together to top compartment, one of the drawers that was facing out had something scribbled on it. I was pretty pissed having spent 45 minutes putting this baby together and then discovering writing on the drawer! That's when it struck me ... three drawers... maybe I should paint them ombre style! So I did! It's not too visible in the picture but I painted them a mauvy grey color, gradually adding more and more white to the paint to get an ombre effect.
Sorry for the mediocre picture but my apartment doesn't get much light!
The top unit of my little makeup corner, is a three drawer unit, originally designed to hold paper. I decided to store my palettes in the top drawer and my makeup small pots such as lip products, cream eye shadows and gel liners in the second drawer. The last drawer has plastic dividers which hold mostly lipglosses and a few lipsticks.
In the second unit, in the bottom drawer, I have housed my blushes and MAC, Dior and Estée Lauder lipsticks.
On top of my combined units, I have brush holder, and various (messy!) products I am either testing out, or plan on swatching.
My eyeliners and lipliners live in this little glass vase I found at Winners.
My foundations and powders are stored in the space below. The brown storage box in the back keeps my backups and extra mascaras yet to be opened.
Woah! That was a long post! But I figured for all you Ikealess ladies out there, this might be helpful! Be mindful that these drawers are a bit hard to open - they stick to each other as well so they are a pain to open. I hear this can be fixed by lubricating the drawer's underside with a wax stick although I haven't tried it yet. But I'm happy with this arrangement for the time being! I really wanted a more compact system to store my products and keep them in relative order at the same time. What do you think?
Damn, I still want an Ikea around here though. Sigh.
How do you store your makeup? Do you have a system? Have you had to expand your storage to accommodate your ever growing makeup collection?
