By Francesca Serritella
My bathroom is covered in makeup.
Lipsticks and lip balms live on every ledge and sometimes end up in the dog’s mouth. The closed toilet seat cover is a staging area for foundation and blushes. Brushes peek out of a coffee mug that barely fits on the counter. Eye-shadow compacts litter the sink’s edge, daring to be knocked off and shatter on the floor.
In my defense, my bathroom is so small, three things out of place make it look like a disaster zone.
And I never have only three things out of place.
I don’t let it stay like this. When someone is coming over, or when the chaos gets to me, I feverishly sweep all of my scattered items into various overstuffed gift-with-purchase cosmetics bags.
The cosmetics bags have a ranking system that only I know: The denim one is for the current, heavy-use rotation makeup items. I could probably throw out all but this one and not notice. The beat-up black bag is really meant to only hold brushes, but instead it’s stuffed with former-favorite lipsticks, lesser-used eyeliners, and free samples.
The dog-hair-magnet Vera Bradley bag lives under my sink, I rarely open it and I don’t remember what’s in it, but sometimes I stuff something else into it when I’m in a fit of cleaning desperation.
All have dried-out, rancid mascaras mixed throughout.
They say you’re supposed to throw out mascara every three months.
Do they think I’m made of money?
My mascara gets thrown out only when it smells like rotten eggs or gives me pinkeye, whichever comes first.
Until then, I will rake those crusty bristles through my lashes like they owe me money.
Because they do. I don’t even want to know the profit margin on a tube of Great Lash. And too often, I will buy a new mascara on impulse but still not throw the old one away, so it’s a surprise which one gets opened each morning, the fresh or the stinky.
Which brings me to my recent epiphany. I was on Sephora.com searching for the perfect bright berry lipstick, scouring reviews with an intensity that ought to be reserved for reading medical charts, when I was overcome with déjà vu.
Hadn’t I already hunted down the perfect bright berry lipstick?
I went down to my bathroom and performed an archeological dig to find the Bite Beauty lipstick I bought last year. I twisted open the cap in triumph, only to be hit with the sour play-dough scent of all-natural ingredients past their sell-by date.
And I only wore it twice. Twenty bucks down the drain because I didn’t keep better track of my cosmetics.
I’d had enough. I was sick of having my stuff all over the place, wasting money losing things, wasting time looking for it, etc.
My bathroom has less than twenty-five square feet of floor space. The only storage is a medicine chest, which is already full, and three recessed wall shelves, seventeen inches wide and a mere three inches deep. If I was going to organize my makeup collection with this limited storage, I was going to need the help of the one store every messy person loves and fears:
The Container Store.
I love and hate The Container Store. It’s a cheap high of false promises. Take a hit, and all your messy-person problems will disappear.
Then the buzz wears off, and you’re lost in the wilderness of a thousand boxes as empty as your soul.
If I thought The Container Store was overwhelming in person, I quickly learned that online, it’s even worse. I scrolled through pages upon pages of, well, containers, and because they were only images against a white screen, I had no sense of size or scale without clicking to read the dimensions, which made finding what I needed painstaking and tedious. I had to search through no fewer than two hundred and forty “makeup organization” products before I found clear, stackable acrylic items that could fit on my tiny shelves.
I dusted off my high school geometry skills to maximize my 153 square inches of space. I diagrammed my shelves on a legal pad, mapping out my options with different combinations of the miniature modular containers like Tetris pieces.
I should’ve drawn my calculations on the windows like in A Beautiful Mind. Sure, John Nash advanced the study of differential equations, but did he understand contouring?
When the containers arrived the next week, of course I’d messed up somehow and they didn’t all fit, forcing me to improvise—but I was inspired. I could sense for the first time that organization was within my reach.
I purged my makeup stash. Everything got opened and tested to see if it deserved a spot in this new, glittering, acrylic-crystal utopia. I found the courage to throw away cosmetics I’d been holding onto since my college theater makeup artist days. My waste bin became a mascara graveyard.
Maybelline they rest in peace.
It took a few hours, but I had done it—a place for everything and everything in its place. I took a photo to send to my mom, because she’s known my makeup-strewn bathrooms since my middle-school years, when I would do a full face of makeup before bed to practice my techniques. (I still do this sometimes, by the way.) She had to see it now, looking so tidy and perfect, or she’d never believe me.
When I lowered my iPhone camera, I noticed I had two empty spots in my brand-new tiered lipstick organizer.
Hmph. I thought, I could actually buy a couple new.
Good thing I took that picture.
Because God knows how long it will stay this way.
Francesa’s novel FULL BLOOM will be out in paperback on July 21, 2026.
Lisa’s new thriller THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING is on sale July 14, 2026
Copyright © Francesca Seritella