little white truths

Hello and welcome to my three month update for my skincare no buy.

As you may know, I started the no buy back in December 2017 (see intro post here) and we're now at the halfway point so I thought it might be useful to check in and let you know how I'm going.

Do note that I've made two essential purchases since the beginning of my no buy, the first being a lip mask to treat my dry lips (see update here) and the second being a cream that my dermatologist prescribed to treat my contact dermatitis (see update here).

So I've done three months and I've only made two essential purchases, which is pretty good for me because in the past I've made a couple of skincare purchases each month and it got to the point where my stores were getting too large and overwhelming.

My aim is to keep this going until the beginning of June - June being my birthday month - at which point I might allow myself to buy an item or two (I suspect I'll be running out of some things by then), and after that I may well reinstate the ban until the festive season.

Reason being, pennies are tight these days because my daughter is doing more hours at kinder this year than she was doing in childcare last year, so we've needed to cut out non-essential purchases and also look at reducing household bills like utilities and groceries. 

That's put makeup and skincare squarely on the chopping block, and it wasn't a bad idea for me to go on spending bans for both of them anyway because I have a lot of stock that I need to get through. This includes items that I haven't even open yet (I tend to save purchases for a rainy day), so it's not as though I won't have fun new things to play with in the coming months.

The other thing that's worth mentioning is: I'm doing three separate panning projects again this year (these being Project Pan, Pan that Palette and Project Dent), so it's not as though I have a lot of scope to be playing around with new things anyway. Indeed, I find myself reaching for the same things each day as I try to pan them, so there's really no point in bringing new items in that I won't be able to use much anyway.

I think I'm also coming to the point now where I mightn't have to do Project Pan forever, so I would like to keep that trend going and get my collection down to a point where Project Pan is redundant. This won't mean the end of panning for me - I'll still do the other two - but it will be nice if in 2018 I'm able to say that I don't need to pan anymore unless I want to.

As for how I'm going, I honestly thought it would be harder than it has been because I've done no buys before and I found them to be very difficult. I can't say why they haven't felt as hard this time around - perhaps because I've got so much else to focus on - but I do think that having a very real financial incentive has helped.

What's also helped is that we've tried to make living more frugally part of our whole lives, so we're not just cutting out a few things and letting everything else go, but rather we're trying to create better spending habits as a whole. I honestly think that changing an entire pattern of behaviour has helped me not notice the makeup and skincare so much.

And while it's not as though we weren't watching the pennies before, I think that making them a bigger part of our daily focus has slightly changed the way we've been living since the beginning of the year.

I guess what I'm saying is: I'm not only cutting spending from all fronts, but I'm also working on decluttering a lot of junk from the house. Those two things paired together are working in concert to make the no buy process feel easier, because they're bringing two benefits: one, we're better able to meet our bills; and two, we're bringing less things into the house and also removing old things at the same time, which means there's less for me to deal with when I'm cleaning, less toys to put away and also less clutter to look at. All positive things.

So in sum, the skincare no buy is going well and I've stuck to my initial goal - which is to only buy things if I really need to, and I've only needed to buy things twice.

My goals for the skincare no buy also haven't changed, and I still intend to go until the beginning of June and then reassess to work out whether I need to continue it after my birthday month.

And as mentioned above, I think the no buy hasn't been as taxing this time because I haven't just been focused on not buying beauty products: I've also been focused on spending less overall and reducing the amount of clutter in the house.

That's all from me. Hope all's well with you, and speak soon x

* All images courtesy of unsplash.com