How our quest for beauty leads to clutter

How our quest for beauty leads to clutter.

What makes you feel beautiful?

Sometimes the clutter in our lives (especially in the bathroom and clothing closet) reflects our desire to feel beautiful.

This tendency to look for beauty in acquiring stuff happens more than you think. Collections of items that make us feel beautiful, or promise the experience of youth and beauty build up all around us, especially during challenging times.

Tubes of red lipstick. 💋 Face masks. New shoes. 👟

Entire industries are built around feeding our desire to feel good in our own skin. And they know how to work us.

We want to feel a certain way, so we go out and buy something that gives us that good-feeling hit. A new lipstick, face lotion, or shirt.

And it works…for a minute. ⏰

But the high of a shiny new thing ✨ usually only lasts for a few days. Then we go back to our baseline “normal” again, and look for another hit.

This ends in having piles of these items collected around our house that we never use.

During the pandemic, I let my beauty routines slide (my grey sweatpants and I became besties). And it’s been hard to get back on track and feel like myself again.

A few months ago, I decided to start looking for ways to wake myself up and leave the sweatpants behind me. ☀️

I’m a low-maintenance girlie and I really like simple solutions to feeling pretty. I started to explore lip stains. They seemed like the perfect solution. I could apply them once and then forget about them as I went about my day. Yes, please! Just my style!

I ran to Ulta and bought a couple of colors. 💄 But they didn’t quite do the job (they wore off after a few minutes once I drank water). So, I exchanged them for a few other brands. Then I went to Sephora. Then to the Tiktok shop.

Before I knew it, I had 10 tubes of lip stain but hardly wore them.

I went from looking for something that made me feel beautiful, to being on a hunt for something that may not even exist.

But there was something comforting in the search. As long as I was still “on the hunt,” the potential was still alive.

I kept telling myself that there might still be a magical unicorn🦄 that would make me feel good about myself again.

The truth is that the lip stains I bought were all perfectly good. It’s just that they didn’t do what I needed them to…make me feel good in my skin after a very long, painful period of time.

They couldn’t do what I wanted them to do. They were just lipsticks.

I had to rethink my plan. And decided to start to look for ways to feel beautiful without anything external.

I find that I feel most joyful (the state I feel most beautiful in) when I’m in nature. I started to make it a priority to go for a morning walk with the sunrise. And then I set a timer and stepped out of the office to watch the sunset each day.

And I needed to spend more time with people who really love and value me. I released a few frenemies from my life and started spending more time with people who feel safe, happy, and seen.

And it’s been working. I feel better in my skin, and I feel like I’m radiating more joy than I have in years.

It was never about finding the right lip stains for me to be beautiful; it was about reawakening the light within me.

Sometimes the solutions to our clutter have nothing to do with stuff. Sometimes we need to fill our lives with something so that there isn’t a hole we’re trying to fill inside.

Once we do this, the physical stuff starts to feel so much easier to sort out because we’re not trying to make it do some superhuman task.

What items have you used to meet a bigger need in your life? Comment below and tell me your go-to’s.

Wishing you a beautiful day!