Report: From the depths of my make-up bag

There’s a moment in my day that I look forward to. It comes at roughly 11 o’clock when Emerald Street, the daily e-mail from the team behind Stylist, plops into my inbox. It’s a virtual mid-morning snack- I anticipate its arrival and promptly gobble it down.

One instalment this week was on make-up bags. Now these have never excited me. My mum goes wild for a ‘pretty’ make-up bag and for some unfathomable reason my Grandma presents me with one every Christmas. It is a tradition I would happily opt out of as I now have a whole stash of them in assorted floral prints- reminding me of the £20 notes that could have been.

I have one chosen make-up bag and it is to this that my mind wandered. I began to think of it rather fondly – I realised I’d had it since I was nineteen, that it had been round the world with me and seen me through numerous nights out…

My thoughts turned to its contents and I experienced a gradual, dawning disgust.  Some of the items in there were as old/ well travelled as the bags itself. I blushed with guilt, resolved to rectify the problem and returned to my press list.

I went home that night and gingerly unzipped the bag. Digging through the contents was like a visitation from the ghost of make-up past. Some of the items were hideously out of date- and I’m not just talking sell-by date. There was a horrific double-ended eye-shadow wand in two shades of equally lurid metallic green and a two-tone blusher that was almost as bad. I traced them back to circa age 15 when I obviously decided that one bad colour just wasn’t enough.

I sat back on my heels, exhausted by my obligatory trip down memory lane. Embarrassed as I was, a small part of me refused to believe I was alone in my hoarding tendencies. I braced myself and sent out an office text. Yes text- it needed urgent addressing.

The response I got back was not only a relief but was also fascinating. Everyone had items in their make-up bag at least as old as mine. Lucy cheered me up no end when she declared that she had a blusher brush older than her son… her son is 15. She also fessed up to owning an ancient eye-shadow palette given to her by a drag queen.

The moral of this story is clear. This week, when the torrential rain makes leaving the house problematic, use the time to clean out your make-up bag. You will never use that crumbling bronzer and that lilac eye shadow makes you look like you’ve been punched. It’s bad enough that your nineties make-up has been immortalised in photographs, you do not need to hold hostage the offending glitter-gloss.