Reddit Exorcised My Makeup Demon

I’m not sure if I should be proud or embarrassed to admit that I hit Rouge at Sephora for several years in a row. If you know, you know.

In case you don’t, it means each calendar year, I loaded up on over $1,000 worth of makeup, skincare, hair care and fragrance products from Sephora alone. Add to this the $500+ per year I was spending on similar goodies at Ulta, and the two to three beauty subscription boxes I was a member of at any given time, and you can imagine the piles and clusters of products that infested my home. I don’t have an excuse. I’m not a makeup artist. I just love pretty things and the dopamine hit that I get when I make them mine.

Now, could I use all of these glorious treats over the course of a year? Absolutely not, and this resulted in my need for multiple drawers to hold my current products and overflow bins to hold the queue of products that were waiting to be opened and used. When I put it like that, it seems like… a problem.

Reddit to the Rescue

You can imagine how relieved I was to find the Makeup Rehab subreddit, a supportive community of people challenging themselves to buy fewer beauty products. Finally, a community of people who could a) deeply relate to my aesthetic-obsessed ways, and b) were committed to getting their makeup overspending and overconsumption under control.

The group participates in challenges, both together and individually, which appeals to the dopamine-seeker in me. A few of these include:

1. No-Buy and Low-Buy Challenges: Members commit to refraining from purchasing new makeup products for a designated period. These challenges encourage participants to use and appreciate products already in their stashes.
2. Project Pan: The Project Pan involves “panning” specific items: diligently using them until they are gone. Panning takes its name from the metal pan that becomes visible underneath a pressed powder product (such as blush or eye shadow) when it is almost gone.
3. Reverse Rouge: My absolute favorite, participants in this challenge track the prices of the items they use up throughout the year. As they pan items, each participant ascends through the ranks of the sustainability “loyalty program” earning titles that are a play on Sephora and Ulta’s loyalty program tiers, such as “Beauty Outsider.” If a user can use up $1,000 worth of product already in their stash, they hit Reverse Rouge!

Reverse Rouge has its own app for the users to track pans and spends, both individually and as a group. The group’s collective goal for 2024 is to use $100,000 worth of product from their stashes.

The Reverse Rouge Effect

• I’m motivated to avoid beauty spending. I get a dopamine hit for making my “panned” dollar total climb, and I’m not going to jeopardize that.
• My space is much neater than it used to be. I am now focused on using up one product before opening another in the same category, but I used to have a bunch of half-used varieties of everything in my collection.
• I’m conscious of what is in my stash. Before starting this challenge at the beginning of 2023, I could have told you about 20% of the contents of my Giant Beauty Bins of Doom. Now that’s more like 90%
• Because I know what I have, I know what I don’t need to buy. This eliminates impulse purchases during sales.

How do you curb your inner beauty demon?