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Keeping TrackWhen you start to accumulate of any one sort of thing, it only makes sense that it becomes more difficult to keep track of. Some of us (myself included) have accumulated quite a quantity of makeup. So then... how do you keep from buying the same things over and over? How the hell do you know what you have? One option is to have an insane memory and keep track of everything that way... or, you could create an inventory.  Follow up: As you can probably tell, mine is extremely thorough. There are many colour-coded tabs with the grid lines coloured to match for each page. The tabs I maintain are: complete, bases, blushes, brushes, complexion, gloss, lip colour, lipliner, liners, pigments, powders, palettes, shadows, misc, expecting and swaps. Holy cheese! And this is just for my MAC products. I keep another excel file entirely for the rest of my makeup, with different tabs per brand. I keep several columns per section, including things like shade name, product type, finish, collection it was released with, colour family, et cetera. This is super handy, as I can sort each page by whatever category is currently the concern and see what I have! It lets me search for approximate dupes, too, and I can read through and see what I've been neglecting when I'm plotting ideas. It's definitely helpful to have tabs tracking purchases and current swaps, too, as those aren't things you want to forget. Another benefit of having this inventory is it lets me take "roll call" every now and then; I'm absolutely dreadful at putting lip products back at the end of the day (I take them with for touch-ups). I can sit down with my makeup and laptop and see pretty easily what I need to find, and what's safely in its place. OCD? Maybe a little. I also like that it helps me keep tabs on whether or not a particular part of my collection is getting wildly out of control. I particularly aim to not own too many lipglosses at one time, as they go bad more quickly than anything else (I'm on a strict no-more-lipglosses streak until I use some up, by the way). Do I NEED 20 blue eyeliner pencils? If I get up to that many (I'm nowhere near, FYI, it's just an example), it probably is time some go up for swap. The trickiest part is remembering to faithfully update - every time something new comes in or something goes out, UPDATE. Otherwise, the inventory becomes inaccurate and is less helpful. Don't be afraid to add more columns of information - it can only help! If you look closely at the picture above (which is a screen-cap of my inventory, yo If you're interested in how I do it, the categories I have per section are: Any questions? |
     Cosmetosaur and all its work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License. | |||||||||
), you may notice that I have repeats of some items. This is because I opt to enter each item 
