Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash

It has officially been decided that come June 1st I will be moving out of my current apartment. I have moved multiple times, but this last move was miserable. I am so not looking forward to moving in a few months. My thought process is I will try to have as few unnecessary things to deal with as possible. So I am essentially starting a no-buy and project pan type challenge for a few categories. The largest category I am focusing on, to no one’s surprise, is beauty products, which includes but is not limited to makeup, nail polish, perfumes, bath bombs, and body wash. I recently detailed my makeup collection on this blog, so I won’t rehash those numbers. It will not surprise anyone who read those posts that I am less than confident in my abilities to whittle down my makeup collection by use alone.

Nail polishes I decluttered within the last 6 months because a number were getting dried out or were no longer my style. I have been left with three sets of press-on nails, one set of nail stickers, one color polish, a base coat, and a top coat. The nail stickers I will get one use out of and in my previous experiences I will only get one use out of the press-ons. This means that to make a significant dent in my nail collection I need to do my nails at least 4 times before June 1st. I am decently confident in my ability to use them up, especially since I’m moving them from the back of my closet to right on top of my dresser. I am less confident in my ability to make a dent in the bottles of polish, but I will be very happy with such a minimal collection, especially with how infrequently I do my nails.

Perfumes will be a challenging category. I currently own 12 full-size perfumes. There is no way I can decrease this by use alone, which means I will need to make some hard decisions about parting with my perfume collection. Or I accept that I will be on a decade-long no-buy and I am forced to cart my collection every time I move. While I am not ready to make that decision yet I thankfully have about five more months before I have to reckon with my previous acquisition habits.

Bath bombs I am already feeling pretty confident about. I only own enough bath bombs for 10 baths (like 6 of them come from these bars that will give me two baths each). I feel pretty confident that with this challenge I can take approximately 2 baths a month. Body wash on the other hand is gonna be hard. I have six things of backup body wash. Two of those are tiny samples that shouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks, but the full-size products could easily last me months.

Swinging back to a category I feel confident about, candles. I only own 7, and in another situation of do as I say not as I do, I let them burn supervised for like 90% of the day. Which yes can be dangerous even supervised because of the effects prolonged exposure to that high of heat can have on the material of the candle container, so please do not do this yourself, please follow the manufacturer’s guidelines of burning candles for no more than 4 hours at a time.

The last category I want to be cognizant of for now is books. I have not felt like I made a dent in my number of unread books since the last time I wrote about my book hoarding. I still have 96 unread books and 9 partially read books. But now I’m faced with the prospect of packing and carrying all of them, which I really don’t want to do unless I have to. So I want to be pretty harsh. If I don’t read them before moving the titles get added to my GoodReads TBR, but the physical book gets donated. Overall I don’t feel daunted by this like I do my perfume collection for some reason, but that is to be psychoanalyzed at a later date.

For now, those are the categories I am doing a strict no buy on with the intent of owning less come June 1. I am open to adding other categories if I become aware of any problematic spending or acquisition habits. To keep my motivation going I will be doing semi-regular empties updates to celebrate my successes. Please wish me luck. I’d also love to hear if you’re doing a similar project pan or no-buy type challenge yourself and what categories you’re focusing on.