I’m culling my makeup collection as Andrea Robinson recommended in Toss the Gloss. As I go through my collection, I think of the wonderful creative entrepreneurial people that I’ve met over the years through The Style Page. Their pieces hold special memories for me, and I’ve kept them.

Then there are the products that are no longer around (except in my closet):

• reflect.com, an abortive attempt by P&G to create “customized” palettes (actually, the options were pretty limited).  My item is not a custom palette, but a limited edition face palette that reflect created for Chico’s (yes, Chico’s)
• M Professional, an inexpensive line (not tested on animals except boyfriends 🙂  that featured eye shadow singles with the screw-top lids that MAC made famous in the 90s
• Lisa Hoffman Beauty skin care (before she focused on fragrance)
• B’Box, which featured eye shadow and lip color matchsticks
• Vital Radiance, which was Revlon’s disastrous venture in creating a cosmetics line for women 50+
• L’Oreal Paris True Match liquid bronzer: it came in a mini-me glass bottle and looked like malted milk!
• FYLO (For Your Lips Only), which featured lip gloss cubes that you could snap into a palette.  This brand was created by Heidi Harris, who is now associate concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.  Hometown hero! Yay!
• Calvin Klein, a color cosmetic line sold at Sephora that predated his CK Calvin Klein line from Markwins International and his current line CK One from Coty, which is sold exclusively by Ulta stores and ulta.com.  I miss Calvin Klein: no gimmicky or cutesy stuff, just sophisticated shades for grown women, and the Lucite packaging made this line stand out among  color cosmetics lines.
• Sally Hansen Natural Beauty Inspired by Carmindy, which predates her current line Carmindy & Co.  There was a commentator on my old blog whose hatred of Carmindy came across as pathological.

There was the Givenchy make-up that a PR person gave me to thank me for a story I published about a charity auction for the Somaly Mam Foundation. Alas, Somaly Mam proved to be a fraud.

I couldn’t find those little plastic spatulas (great for scooping out loose powders and creams), but by going through my makeup collection, I found a lot of them.  Likewise, I couldn’t find nail boards and I’d pester the folks at the local TD Bank branch to get nail boards that they give away.  Again, by going through my collection, I found lots of nail boards.

I’m thinking about buying this Tabletop Spinning Cosmetic Organizer by Lori Greiner to organize my newly edited and curated (cough, cough) makeup collection.  Do you own one?  What do you think?

I’ll never get my collection down to the size of a Prada black nylon cosmetics bag, as Ms. Robinson suggested. I had a perfectly good knock-off where the emblem looked like the Prada emblem.