Lipstick Traces

Have you ever used your lipsticks down to the very bottom? Below the rim, there is about a third more product left. Depending on how much I like the color or the price of the lipstick, I've found various ways to use it all. I've used an old lipstick brush that I didn't like very much (the brush was too small) or my finger or any implement I found on my makeup shelf to dig it out, like the opposite end of a pair of tweezers or a makeup spatula. But none of these methods were very satisfactory and I ended up throwing the lipstick out. Or saving it if it was MAC because if you return six used MAC lipsticks, you get one free. But that takes me a couple years.

I remember my grandmother, Bootsie, always using a lipstick brush to get to the bottom of her Merle Norman lipstick. Merle Norman! Does anyone know about that brand anymore? Bootsie had a collection of small gold Merle Norman lipsticks that looked antique to me at age eight. And she might have had them for twenty years because she bought lipstick refills so she could use the gold tubes over and over. It would be great if brands did that today. I have some gorgeous YSL lipstick cases that I would love to refill. But I can't, so they become either clutter or landfill.

My collection of used lipsticks recently got large enough that I decided to get serious about using them up. I bought a lipstick brush from Sephora for about $12 and I liked it very much until one morning I was in a hurry and pulled too energetically on it and it came apart in four impossible to reassemble pieces. I bought a new one at MAC for twice the price, but the quality is better.

MAC sample jars, handy for using every bit of a lipstick tube. 

I asked the woman at MAC if she uses up the entire lipstick. She does and her method is to scoop it out with small makeup spatulas and put it in little MAC sample jars. She kindly gave me a few to do the same. I've done this before. It's a method I learned from my Aunt Caryl, daughter of my Merle Norman grandmother. She mixes the remainder of several tubes into one small container. This works if all the colors are similar. Once I mixed some red tones with brown and that did not work.

It's time for a new lipstick design. One that comes in a beautiful case, can be easily used to the very bottom and then refilled. Who should we call about that?