Are you a frugal person who hates to waste things that you bought? Or are you an eco-conscious consumer who does not want to thoughtlessly dispose of perfectly good product? Well, fear not, I have some tips for how to keep using skincare products that just don’t sit well with you.
Why I have an abundance of random products…
I’ve said before that I have combo-oily sensitive skin. (If you are curious on how to find out your skin type, head here because I wrote a post on just that topic!) In my lifetime of using skincare products at a high level (AKA not just moisturizing and calling it a day), I have had just a handful of products where I end up breaking out pretty severely. I’m talking redness, bumps, pimples. It looked like I was back in high school. It clearly was not a pretty sight, and the first thing that I did was STOP using the product. If you just started using a new product and you also see a spike in the amount of flareups on your skin, chances are that it is due to this new product and not some other thing! So you need to get it out of your system as quickly as possible.
Once you stop using your product cold turkey (and hopefully your skin starts looking amaaaazing!), you now have a product that you probably spent a hefty amount of money on. And it has two possible endpoints: 1) sitting on your shelf for all eternity (or until you move — that just happened to me as I moved across the country from Boston to San Francisco. Trust me, this is a bad option when you fill up your whole trash bin with all of the products you wish you could love but never completely did) or 2) going into the garbage now rather than the inevitable “later.” But what if I told you that there was a third option? What if I said that there was another option for you?
Necessity is the mother of innovation, right? Well, the need for me is to recover ALL of the sunk costs that I have with skincare. I hate being wasteful because not only is it a waste of the earth / economy’s resources, but it is also just hard on my wallet to be throwing products away when I save for so long to get them. So, I have devised a few fixes just to help me feel better about myself wasting products. And I hope that they help you out as well! Or maybe you just are not as budget-conscious as I am — I don’t judge!
THE FIX
Depending on what the product is, you can apply it in different ways to your body. Here’s my rationale for this. The skin on your face is much more sensitive (and porous) than the skin on your body. If a product is too harsh or too thick for your facial skin, using the product on your body may actually provide some great benefits without it producing the same nasty adverse effects that your face had experienced previously. I’ve made a video walking through my steps here if you prefer it visually! Here are my favorite ways to go about it:
Facial Serum: Caldera+Lab The Good Multi-Functional Serum. Honestly, I was excited about this serum because so many people had been talking about how great of a product it was. But I got such a bad breakout from this. I think it was just too thick for me to use with other products. Pretty much every ingredient in the list is from “wild harvesting” or “organic farming” plants. It was a very natural product. However, sometimes these natural products have a lot of irritants in them, depending on what is actually extracted. And since the ingredient list just states that it is an extract, we literally never know what is in it. We just know that plant x is really good for fixing this specific skin concern and we hope that the extract in product Y actually has the same effect as the plant. This serum says it will make skin brighter & tighter. It definitely made my skin do something, but I wouldn’t say brighter & tighter was it.
Moving on to how exactly I repurpose this… I will put a few drops of this serum into my normal body lotion. Normally I will use the Trader Joe’s Body Butter because it is extremely well priced and it moisturizes super well. However, since I moved to San Francisco, I have just been using a generic Vaseline lotion, so I add a few drops of this serum into the lotion to add an extra amount of moisture and also whatever actives that you get out of the serum. In particular, I really like to add this to extra dry / sensitive areas, like my elbows because they always get so ashy. And that is for sure NOT a good look. It definitely elevates your drugstore lotion to the next level when you put in a $100 serum.
Night Cream: Brandless Night Cream. I know, Brandless is out of business right now. But I still have some of it lying around because it was such a cheap buy! But whenever I used this, I noticed that my skin was much more bumpy and had more irritation. So I definitely had to stop using this, even if it was doing a great job of moisturizing my skin.
Since this night cream is super thick, I actually started using this as a hand cream. The benefits: it moisturizes hands deeply giving you some awesomely soft hands. Plus, it was not greasy at all. I hate it when hand cream is greasy and you can tell exactly where you touched anything (AKA my keyboard was always glossssy after I put some hand cream on). This night cream did not have any of those issues and it performed just as well as any other hand cream I used in terms of the effect on hands. I actually ended up preferring the night cream just because of the lack of grease.
Facial Scrub: A lot of physical exfoliants. I’ll be honest, I used to be obsessed with physical exfoliants. I never used any acids because I was always afraid of them burning my skin up. So I accumulated a lot of physical scrubs over time, which I needed to start using a lot more quickly because I had so many. So instead of buying any body scrubs or one of my favorite body bars from Kiehl’s, I began using these facial scrubs as body scrubs in the shower. I would just take a scoop of the scrub and just use that as I lather throughout. Your body is also covered with skin that needs to be exfoliated and moisturized. If you don’t regularly exfoliate, then you will see a lot more skin shedding and less of an overall healthier skin. You want to look good from head to toe, right? So just take this extra step to exfoliate. It also has the added benefit of getting a further clean for you because it is digging into your skin deeper than just lathering a body wash over skin would.
Another thing that I could definitely see as a potential usage is eye cream being used as a neck cream. Many professionals refer to the skin under your eye as being very similar to the skin on your neck. Logically, it could follow that an eye cream could make a great neck cream to help brighten, moisturize, and prevent any neck wrinkles similar to how eye creams operate. I haven’t actually tried it, so your mileage truly may vary! But if you do try it, definitely let me know because I would be very curious. It also might not be a good usage because eye cream always comes in such small containers anyway.
I am sure that there are more ways to repurpose skincare than just the three I mentioned. I would love to hear what other uses you all have employed because I am sure that you are all very innovative!