Throw away old products, wash your brushes and never skip makeup removal at night

Nov 27, 2013 21:26 GMT  ·  By

Makeup products – quality makeup products, to be sure – are a real investment, especially if you’re the kind of girl who uses the entire range, from primer before applying makeup to thermal water when she’s done. However, hoarding them is perhaps the biggest mistake you can possibly make.

This is a sin makeup artist Amanda Storey is also guilty of, as she admits in a recent piece for Yahoo! Shopping, but it’s also the number one thing she’s advising her clients against. Makeup products, like everything else, have an expiration date and there’s no telling what may happen if you use them after their by-date.

Usually, she says, stylists recommend keeping lipstick and glosses for one year, but she can tell from experience that some products are good even after that. You’re to check on each product package to see for how long it’s good after you opened it for the first time.

However, a good pointer that you should consider throwing away your products is any change to their texture or smell. “Keep an eye (or nose) on the smell, texture and appearance of your lip products. If your lipstick used to smell like vanilla and now it smells like old Crayons, it has gone bad. If your lip gloss is separated in the tube and there's a weird oily film floating around, it's bad,” she says.

“Basically if anything about it changes or has you questioning its quality, toss it,” she says.

If your favorite makeup product has been discontinued, there’s really no point in buying dozens of items to hoard because they will eventually go bad and you will throw them away nonetheless.

Another major bad beauty habit you should break is to not wash your brushes, regardless if you use the same color every day.

“I deep clean my makeup brushes with Ivory unscented dishwashing liquid. I fill up my sink with warm water and let my brushes soak for a few minutes. I empty the sink and then lather up my brushes, and continue rinsing them until the water that runs off of them is clear. I line them up and let them dry flat,” Storey says.

Last but not least because this is one mistake that way too many women make is to not remove their makeup in the evening or, even worse, to not do so and then apply makeup over it the next day. Makeup residue translates into clogged pores which, you probably guessed it, translates into blackheads and nasty breakouts.

Skin will become irritated and will appear older, less healthy. Not removing your eyeliner or, even worse, your mascara, will also affect the health of your lashes, so really, whichever way you look at it, there’s really no reason to skip this important step in your daily beauty routine, that of removing makeup.