How to organise and declutter your toiletries
The ‘smellies’ set: viewed as a pretty safe bet and so probably the most gifted item for birthdays and Christmas, resulting in piles of bath salts, and mountains of body butters in bathrooms across the country!
Here’s how to tackle what you’ve got:
Gather together
Collect up all your new sets, any sets you might have been given at any other points in the year, plus any existing toiletries you’re using (or have bought to use in future) and lay them out in one place.
Review and question
Time to ask yourself -
- Are there items or sets that you are unlikely to ever use (maybe the scent isn’t for you, or they don’t agree with your skin)? Accept that they aren’t for you and put them aside.
- Are there particular items that you won’t reach for? If you hate bath salts because you love instead bubbles, then put aside the ones you know will languish in your cupboard.
Containerise
Find a space – it might be a box, or a shelf, or a cupboard, ideally in the place where you will use these items – that you can store all of your chosen toiletries together so when you run out of shower cream you know where to grab the next one from.
To help maximise your space, take all the individual items out of the boxes they came in – those boxes are pretty but often not practical!
Once the packaging has been removed, if you can’t fit all of the items in the space you have available it’s time to consider whether you need to keep all of the items, or whether you could let go of a few more.
If you know you will definitely use everything then find a good location for your ‘back-stock’, and put a note of where you’ve put this next batch at the bottom of your main container, so when that’s empty you don’t forget where you’ve put them and buy more!
Rehome
If you are happy regifting items to friends, keep a couple of sets to pass on to people and make a note of who they are for and when their birthday is. Resist the urge to keep everything to regift – chances are you’ll forget you have them during the year and just end up buying something new at the time!
Bag up the rest and take them to a local food or hygiene bank, or list them to give away locally on Olio.
I know it can be hard moving on an item that someone has given you, just remember that your friendship exists outside of that gift, and you are not rejecting that friend by rehoming their gift, especially if it isn’t something you love or will use.
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