The English Maximalista

A few months ago, whilst idly scrolling through my Facebook feed, I came across a reel which has since been rattling around the vast vacuum of my mind.

In the video, a woman demonstrated how to effectively use up the dregs of lipstick left at bottom of the tube. Ladies — and some of you gents out there, too — will know what I’m talking about. It’s the end of the life of the lipstick, which generally gets thrown into the bin.

Gone are the halcyon days when the teenage Maximalista would innocently buy Rimmel’s Heather Shimmer for .79p from her local Superdrug in England. For she has long since graduated to insanely expensive French cosmetics, which cost an arm, a leg, and firstborn child. I can only imagine how much money has been thrown in the rubbish because I thought something was finished and unusable…

Anyway, a few months ago, I watched as the woman in the video scraped her old lipstick into a ramekin [I recommend le Creuset], plopped in a dollop of Vaseline, then heated the mixture in the microwave for a few seconds to melt it together. Et voila — she had created some lip balm!?!

Ingenious!

Personally, I use a lip brush to avail myself of the slops in my lipstick tubes, which I find furthers its life for a few more months. But sadly, I have never been able to shove my fat blusher brushes into the Chanel blusher tubes. Fruitlessly, I have tried.

Thus, in the past, I have simply thrown these tubes away, then forked out another bum-clenching $52 for a new one.

Not no more.

Because today, you fine people, I got around to adapting the aforementioned ingenious idea to prolong the life of my expensive blushers, of which I keep numerous tubes stashed in various convenient spots around the house. 

…Also in my car. And my purse. As well as in my travel toiletry bag. For behold, it turns out — as I discovered — I had a dozen tubes knocking about, in varying stages of use. 

Don’t be judging.

What did I have to lose? So, I took one out as the guinea pig. You know, just to see if it would work? And guess what, gentle reader? It did!! SUCCESS!!

Spoiler alert: it was an exceedingly messy endeavour. Effective, yet MESSY. Be warned. If you do decide to give it a go, I recommend wearing latex gloves. Use kitchen paper. Readers, you will need plenty of kitchen paper. (You can thank me later.)

Turns out I didn’t need to mix my blusher with Vaseline, though, as it already had a perfect consistency of viscosity that didn’t need to be blended.

*****

See what happens when Mr Maximalista leaves me home alone for a few hours? Boredom strikes. Next thing I know, my canine sidekick and I are in the kitchen, experimenting with random shit I saw on the internet.

At least this time, the experiment worked. We are not going to mention the abortive incident with the potato and the milk jug… 

That was a dark, dark day.

Lots of love,

M xo