I'm usually not one for resolutions at the beginning of the year - my main reason being that I'm terrible at following through on them. But this year I'm hoping it will be a little different.
Without going into details, last year majorly sucked. I'm not talking about the macro world issues that took place, although those were pretty bad, but about my little corner of the universe. I bring this up because you might have noticed a decrease in the number of blog posts I've published in the past year. Or if you look at my Instagram feed, you might have seen my unusually high number of beauty purchases in recent months. Let's just say I've been using beauty shopping as a coping mechanism and that I need to stop this habit right now.
I looked back at my post from the beginning of last year where I loosely laid out the guidelines I had in mind. I acknowledged my poor resolution-keeping skills and said I wouldn't do any project pan or make a dent challenges. I didn't embark on any of those but I did try a lip stash challenge... which I promptly abandoned a few weeks later (which is why you never saw an update). I got better at de-stashing makeup I wasn't using last year and gave away a lot of things to friends.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the goals I'll be trying to accomplish with regards to my beauty habits:
Cut back significantly on makeup purchases - This especially goes for eyeshadows, cheek products and lip products. I have amassed so many eyeshadows, blushes, highlighters, bronzers and lippies that there's no way I can use up even a fifth of my stash before it goes bad.... I guess I've always known that but writing it out makes it that much worse. The allure of "limited edition" sometimes trips me up but I'm going to try to resist them all for at least the first half of 2017.
Spend less time researching beauty products - From keeping up on new launches to finding out when the best deals are, I spend a lot of my free time researching about beauty. This year, I'm dedicating more time to learning about other things I care about rather than enticing myself with more things I want to purchase.
Use my expensive makeup products more - I want to get better at treating my pricey makeup items less like pretty things to look at and more like, well, makeup. I often hesitate to travel with my high end products for fear of losing or breaking them. But that's quite silly because they were made to be used. I did not shell out $50 for a highlighter only to use it in a flatlay....
Hit pan on at least six shades in my Urban Decay Naked Palette - This is one of the oldest high end eyeshadow palettes I have in my collection and also one of my most versatile. I can do a whole look with just this palette and it's very easy to mix-and-match other shadows with this palette as well. I already see a bit of a dip in Naked (the lighter of the two matte browns) but I think this particular goal could take the entire year to complete.
Share more looks and FOTDs - A lot of my blog content depends on new purchases which gives me an excuse to purchase something. That's just silly since this isn't a job for me (and I don't intend on making it so). I want to share more makeup combinations and ideas with you guys, even if they're simple neutral looks (since that's what I go for 90% of the time).
Continue investing in high quality brushes and rotating out less-used ones - I've been steadily adding to my collection of luxury Japanese-made makeup brushes. But doing a less good job of giving away brushes I don't use as much. I want to continue slowly adding in unique, functional brushes to fill gaps in my collection while passing on the older brushes I don't reach for anymore to someone who would be able to use them.
Most of my beauty resolutions are more akin to guidelines, apart from panning the Naked Palette, because I've found that works better for me. I have more concrete resolutions for the non-beauty parts of my life that I'm a lot more excited about. Here's to hoping I can accomplish those (and we'll see how the beauty ones fare).