Stooooop! Noooooo! Waiiit! Don’t throw away that tube of makeup yet!! Sorry to be dramatic, just kidding I love being dramatic, but everyone is always looking for ways to save money on makeup without compromising quality and there is an easy way to do it right in front of your face.

Most of the time when you think you’re done with something, especially a liquid, there are actually a few more applications worth of product stuck inside the packaging. That might not seem like a ton of money saved to you, but think about it. If you get a few extra uses out of your makeup with every bottle, thats going to add up over time. Even if you buy one or tubes fewer tubes of 40 dollar CC cream a year, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Want to see what I mean? This is a tube of Smashbox PhotoReady CC cream that I recently “finished”

Look at how much is left in there! Thats like at LEAST 4 or 5 full faces of makeup left . . .and I mean I was squeezing the hell out of this bottle to get the last drops out.

To open it up I simply made sure all of the product was squeezed out of the top of the tube, and cut the top off with scissors. At that point you can easily get to the product and apply it to your face.

Unfortunately if you just leave it open like this it’s going to dry up and oxidize and get contaminated. So you have a few choices. You can invest a few dollars in some cosmetics jars (or use old ones that you have cleaned out from other products) and scrape the product into one of them or you can store the tube in a small ziplock bag OR you can do what I do . . .

Which is close off the open top with a chip clip! These particular chip clips from IKEA work really well because they clamp on and don’t come off until you unhook them, but a regular chip clip will probably keep it closed too.

But what about things that come in bottles with pump tops? Those are notorious for having extra product at the bottom that won’t come out. And you can see it right there through the glass, mocking you. Usually there is a way to get the top open. It may not be obvious but they often screw open at a certain part of the lid. For example . . .

The pump top on Make Up For Ever HD Foundation screws open in the middle, and you would never really know unless you tried to remove it. If your particular bottle doesn’t though, it’s usually still pretty easy to pop the top off, most of the time it just takes a little bit of finagling. Once the top is off you can get to all that extra makeup that’s at the bottom of the bottle and just refuses to come up through the pump because it’s a jerk. Do your job and get on my face, makeup! Gosh.

Usually I just use one of my smaller makeup brushes to pick up some product from inside the bottle, but you can also buy “Beauty Spoons” that are designed specifically to get that last bit of extra makeup out of it’s container. I guess I’m not the only special snowflake who does this if there are special spoons around just to help get the job done.

So as simple as that is, give it a try. It works on pretty much anything that’s liquid or cream (tubes of eyelid primer are a big one too!) It’s an easy way to save money on makeup without buying something cheaper, which is nice because I don’t like to compromise quality . . .I mean who does right?

 

Tags:  bargains Makeup tips tricks