A Few Days Off

Hey doll hey. How’s your day/night going? Great I hope. I’m having a super bad Fibromyalgia day … low energy and high pain.

I have to take a few days off from playing in my makeup.

Today I’m focusing on washing my makeup brushes that have piled up.

This is about 2 months of makeup brushes and even though I still have a ton of clean and ready to be used brushes I don’t like to let my dirty brush pile get too far out of control.

I use a dish tub that I purchased at the dollar store filled 1/3 of the way with hot tap water and 48 ounces of boiling hot water from the stove.

I use a bar of Dove Pink Beauty Bar to cleanse my brushes… I also use this soap to clean my beauty sponges and Face Halos daily. It’s super gentle and smells amazing… leaving my brushes and sponges smelling nice even after a few uses of them.

To scrub my brushes clean I use this mesh strainer that I purchased at the dollar store. It makes getting my brushes clean so much easier and faster. I just get the brushes wet and rub them in the soap and then run the brushes all over the inner surface of the mesh strainer and then dip my brushes into the dish tub to rinse them clean.

Once they are clean I rub them over a clean towel and place them on another clean towel to dry over night.

Normally I don’t let my brushes pile up this long, typically I wash my brushes every few weeks or so …. so normally this process takes me about 1/2 hour to 45 minutes. Because I have 2 months worth of brushes, today it took me a little over 2 1/2 hours to cleanse all the brushes.

When I cleanse my brushes I start with the face brushes, starting with the densest ones to the lightest ones. I then move to my eye brushes, starting with my fluffy crease brushes, moving to my flat shader brushes, then my brow and liner brushes. I find that if I work in this fashion always that I don’t have to switch out my wash basin water but maybe 4 times and all my brushes come out squeaky clean. I also find that since I use the strainer to scrub the brushes that not only do I take less time to clean the brushes it also takes less time to get my brushes to dry. Before I washed my brushes this way it would take about a day and 1/2 to 2 days for my bushes to dry all the way and with now it only takes about 6 or so hours for my brushes to be thoroughly dry.

I also mix a travel spray bottle with homemade brush cleaner … I use 1/4 of the bottle filled with Witch Hazel (the only thing I use witch hazel for), 1/3 of the rest of the bottle with 91% Isopropyl alcohol, and the rest of the bottle with fresh water. I also add a bout 2 to 4 drops of tea tree oil and 3 drops of baby body wash.

I use this brush cleaner to sterilize my brush handles before I put them away and I also use this brush cleaner to sterilize my brushes daily between uses.

I do own one of those dry brush cleaner sponges that I purchased at Sephora but I only use it when I’m doing a look that requires more brushes than I set out for the day …. I typically have 1 flat shader, 3 fluffy crease, 2 pencil, and 1 flat definer brushes… along with a fluffy face brush, a highlighter, bronzer, and all purpose utility face brush. So when I’m in need of using the same brush but for a different color I just simply run it along the dry brush sponge to knock out the previous color.

I chose to not do my makeup today to conserve my energy to clean my brushes but also that I can rest. Tomorrow I will be getting another round of Radiofrequency Ablation … I did a whole post on what RFA is you can read that here. I get this done every 6 months (in 2 sessions, the 1st one on the left hip and then the 2nd one on the right hip) and it truly has helped when it comes to the amount of pain I am in but because I’ll be getting it done on Tuesday I will be on bed rest the rest of that day and will be taking it easy on Wednesday to regroup.

Well that’s it for now dolls. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day/night and that you are in good spirits and health.

Remember …. save a spoon for a bit of lipstick.

XOXO, Nita