My New Beauty Setup

I'm so excited to be sharing this post with you. For such a long time, my makeup was all stored in my old Glossyboxes, all stacked on top of each other, so if I wanted something from one of the bottom boxes it was a pain to get to. This resulted in me using the same old products over and over again and not really getting the full use out of my collection. Hopefully now my new set up will encourage me to be a little more experimental with different products in my collection. I was also having a massive overflow situation, with not enough boxes to store everything, so it was time to do something about it! I've been imagining what this set up would look like for a long time and, whilst there are a couple of little tweaks I'd still like to make, I'm very happy with how it's turned out.


First off I'll get into the furniture, which is all from Ikea! I have the Hemnes dressing table, Alex 9 drawer unit and the Borje chair. I must say a massive thank you to my husband for having the patience to put all of this together for me - there's no way in hell I'd have been able to do this myself! In total the furniture came to £330, which I think is pretty reasonable for what I got.

I've left my dressing table setup quite simple, I didn't want it to look too cluttered and now I have plenty of space to take photographs too. (Please excuse the mess in the mirror, I have bags full of stuff to put on eBay!). So, from left to right, we have a new bottle of Johnson's baby shampoo, which I use to deep clean my makeup brushes, and my MAC brush cleaner. I'm currently storing my most used brushes in this cute pen holder from Wilko, though I think I'll soon have to buy another, so I have one for face brushes and one for eye brushes, as it's starting to get a little cramped in there! Next to my brush holder I have my Lola kabuki brush, which I have to keep separate as it's so small and would get completely messed up if I stored it with the others. In between the two mini drawers I have my Muji storage, which houses all of my current most reached for items. The idea is to go through my collection every month or so and switch up the products in my Muji drawers, so that I'm trying out more things from my collection - look out for a post on what's currently in these drawers very soon. On top of the other mini drawer I just have a Yankee Candle at the moment (Strawberry Buttercream if you were wondering!). I also want to get a mini photo frame to put on here, but I'm yet to find one that I think would fit in. In the far corner of my table I have a lovely grey-toned blue vase, which actually came as part of a set of 3 for just £6 at TJ Hughes, with some artificial flowers from Wilko inside.

The top of my Alex drawers have been kept very simple too. I just have a small basket (part of a set of two which I think were £9 from Tesco) which contains all of my everyday skincare essentials. Behind that I have my trusty No7 makeup mirror which I've had for years. I've kept it tucked away here so that it's not cluttering up my dressing table, but it can easily be pulled down to use when I need it, if I'm doing a more complex eye look for example.

Finding a picture to go up on my wall that I liked and thought would fit it proved to be very difficult! It wasn't until the new Argos catalogue came out and I spotted this lovely picture for just £7.99 that I felt my new beauty corner was complete. I'd wanted a wicker heart to hang off one of the sides of my dressing table mirror, but every one I saw was either the wrong style or was too big, so I thought having this picture on the wall instead would be a good alternative.

Under my table, either side of where my chair would fit in, I have two more slightly larger baskets, one with all of my hair tools in, and the other full of sample products, from magazines, beauty boxes etc, which I really need to start making my way through!

So now onto the drawers! I don't really know what to do with the two drawers on top of the table, so at the moment they don't really have anything of interest in them. All I have in one is a set of fairy lights I bought from Primark which I can't decide whether to put up or not. The idea was that I was going to hang them around my mirror, but I'm not sure if it might be too much. I may put them up in the winter as a sort of Christmas decoration and if I like them I may decide to leave them up. In the big drawer under the table top, I have all of my larger eyeshadow palettes. They are not arranged in any particular way, just how they would fit best in the different sections. I kind of wish I hadn't put the dividers in the drawer, that way I could organise the palettes how I want to and there wouldn't be lots of randoms gaps everywhere!

Looking at the Alex unit, I didn't expect the drawers to be too big, but they are actually surprisingly very spacious. The first six drawers are filled with my makeup collection - I was very shocked when sorting through my collection at just how many lip products I own! In the bottom three drawers I have my nail polish collection, my skincare extras, and my makeup bags/travel cases. As you can see, I'm still storing the majority of my collection within the drawers in my Glossyboxes and their lids. It's not an ideal solution, as I'm not getting the most out of the space in the drawers, but I'm finding it really hard to find some good drawer inserts. Looking back at old storage blog posts, it looks like Ikea used to have something a couple of years ago that was ideal, but it looks like they've stopped selling them now. I may just have everything loose in the drawers, but I don't want to get them messy with makeup marks everywhere! If anyone knows of some good storage ideas for Alex drawers, then please let me know!

What do you think to my new beauty setup? How do you store your makeup?