PSA: Clean yo stuff, kids

Having makeup trouble? 

Clean your brushes!

    Seriously, this is something that I never knew was a thing until I was way too deep into costume makeup to change my ways easily. Get in the habit of cleaning your brushes, sponges, staves of darkness or whatever you use, AT LEAST once a week. To do so, just take a non-aggressive shampoo (don't ask me what that means because I have little to no idea. To the best of my knowledge this means that it's not overly fragrant, and mostly organic-based. I use a repair shampoo on my regular hair, so that works pretty well for my brushes too) and gently massage it into the wet brush bristles. DO NOT pull on the bristles in any way: this is not regrowable hair, any pieces you lose from tugging are gone forever and ruin your brush. Gently wash the shampoo out of the brush, and set somewhere clean and dry to dry off. This will take about 24-26 hours depending on the brush, so maybe do this when you have a day or two to not wear makeup or else when you have a clean back-up brush.

   ALL OF YOUR BRUSHES NEED YOUR LOVE. Unless you have literally never even looked sideways at it, every one of your brushes needs to be cleaned at some point. How often you need to clean it depends on how often you use it, but do know that using things like costume makeup or paint-on lipstick/gloss and then not cleaning your brushes will stain the everloving cheese-its out of them. This may effect how your makeup looks later when you use them again.

Clean your workspace! 

   This may seem like it doesn't matter much, but it is way easier to be creative (at least for me anyway) when the chaos which perpetually surrounds me is at the very least organized chaos. Anyway, you're way less likely to attract dust mites, mice, and spiders with a clean work space. This includes cleaning out your water dishes, making sure that there's never any liquids left out uncapped or uncleaned overnight, and that any hair from plucking or whatever is swept up. 

Clean your makeup! 

What? Clean your makeup? What sorcery is this? Madness and riddles.

  It's true. In order to have untainted colors and foundations, it's vital to clean up your debris. This is especially the case with eyeshadows. Blow off your fallout powder, swipe out any contaminated spots, and use clean no-scent tissues to do so, because otherwise you're just rubbing the powder and the aloe gel they use in scented, soft tissues together.



Reminder: It is totally cool to have cheap materials! I buy most of my makeup online or at CVS, and it works just as well as most other makeup. My brushes probably cost me about ten bucks, and I bought them maybe two years ago. Good stuff does not necessarily mean expensive stuff. As long as it works for you and you take care of it, there is NO REASON that inexpensive materials should be a bad thing. (In fact, I use a lot of cheap hairsprays and powders in my cosplays and crafts because they hold like you wouldn't believe.)