My vanity and makeup storage

I’ll admit, I’ve always been just a tiny bit nosy curious. I like to know everything that’s going on, and I’m pretty sure my siblings threatened me with bodily harm several times when we were kids because I was poking around in their stuff. So now that you know that, it shouldn’t be all that shocking to learn that I like seeing other people’s vanity setups (seriously, it’s the reason I joined Pinterest). I’ve finally got mine to a point that it’s mostly presentable, so I thought I’d share for other people like me.

When my makeup collection outgrew my bathroom cabinet, the biggest obstacle was finding a place to put a vanity. I didn’t want it in the bedroom because I wake up a lot earlier than my husband (out of necessity, not by choice – I’m not a morning person), so I didn’t want to be making lots of noise in there. Other than that, pretty much the only unused real estate in our house is the far end of the master closet, so that’s where it went! Which is why you can see part of a clothes hanger in the photo. The table is an inexpensive writing desk that I picked up at Wal-Mart (here).

I need to work on my nail polish storage – I’d like to be able to see them all at once – but for now it’s on a floating shelf that I believe came from Target. I also keep a little portable speaker up there so I can listen to music while I get ready.

Another floating shelves hold a lamp, whatever my candle of the moment is plus other odds & ends. I used key hooks from TJMaxx (which, by the way, is one of my favorite places to waste time in) to hold my necklaces and bracelets that won’t fit in my jewelry box. I’m also particularly proud of the second one that serves as an eyelash curler display. I’ve been trying forever to think of a way to store them that doesn’t involve being jumbled into a drawer, and this idea just came to me one night when I couldn’t sleep.

This is just a somewhat gratuitous desk closeup. After buying the desk, I realized that it was really hard to see things on the black desktop. Instead of buying a new one, I got a sheet of clear acrylic cut to size at Lowe’s and put white cabinet liner under it. Problem solved!

The left side of my vanity has two sets of Muji 5-drawer cases, which I think are pretty much the most awesome thing ever.  These hold all my eyeshadows, blush and highlight/contour/powder products. On top I have my perfumes, a cup of pencil products (I want to say the cup is from the bathroom section of Target) and a square jar with my sad little palette collection. Seriously, I feel like such a slacker at having eyeshadow palettes.

What with being in a freakin’ closet and all, I don’t have any natural light to work with while I’m doing my makeup. Instead, I use an Ottlite mirror, which has extremely bright daylight-balanced lights on the sides. Sadly it’s been discontinued (whhyyy?), but you can still find them occasionally on ebay. Ottlite also makes a bunch of desk lamps with flexible necks, so you could also get one of those and point it toward your face if you need good light (available at Amazon).

The other side is a big mish-mash of storage drawers. The Muji 5-drawer (bottom left) holds my lip products, brow stuff, shadow pencils, mascaras and flat/short-handled brushes. The smaller drawers on top of them came from Amazon, and those have my nail stuff, q-tips and perfume samples. Soooo many perfume samples! The tower on the right are two sets of InterDesign drawers (which you can get from Amazon and I think the Container Store) that hold the bulkier stuff – primers, foundations, concealers, tools, fake eyelashes, etc. I’m considering replacing them with a couple sets of the large Muji 2-drawers, but these are serving the purpose for now. I keep all my brushes on top – the containers are pretty sparsely populated in this photo because I had just washed most of my brushes and they were still drying. The black one is a pencil holder from Target, and the clear one was another TJMaxx find.

So that’s it! If you want to show yours off too, link it up in the comments or post it on my facebook – I’d love to see it!