This blog post on how to declutter your bathroom was inspired by a comment that somebody made in my Facebook Group. She said:
 … my clutter pain point right now is under the bathroom sink. I seem to collect bottles and jars of personal grooming products…
Image Source:Â https://www.pexels.com/
From all I know, she is probably not the only one struggling with this kind of clutter. Besides all the products we buy ourselves because their advertisement promises us younger looking skin or healthier looking hair, we often receive them as gifts from well-meaning friends and colleagues.
This morning I spent some time in London Drugs (a department store here in Canada) and noticed all kinds of these ready-made gift boxes and baskets full of shower gels, bath salts, body lotions, shampoos and what not. If somebody doesn’t know what to give for Christmas, their go-to gift seems to be something for the bathroom.
Personally, I don’t like these kinds of gifts at all, I am very fussy with what I put on my skin and hair. I always was, even before we started to become aware that there are a lot of toxins and cancer-causing chemicals in cosmetics. As much as possible I don’t put anything on my skin what I would not put in my mouth and eat.
Do you think that’s crazy?
Join me for an experiment
Karen Kingston suggests in her blog post “How to clear most of your bathroom clutter in one go” to try out the following:
First, wash out your mouth with some water. Then take a glove of garlic, slice the garlic in have and rub the garlic oil between two of your toes. She says, within a few minutes, you will taste garlic in your mouth!
The reason is, that anything you put on your skin goes directly into your bloodstream. After you’ve done above test with the garlic, you’ll know that it’s true, and also how fast it travels.
This test will most likely do two things for you:
- from now on you will be much more careful about what you put on your skin and
- second, you’ll probably have less trouble getting rid of some of the products you have hanging around.
This is the perfect segue to start to declutter your bathroom.
Step 1: Don’t Overwhelm Yourself
Like with any clutter clearing project, I suggest you divide it into manageable chunks. Depending on how big your bathroom is, maybe go shelf by shelf or cabinet by cabinet. Simply pick a manageable area to start with and start taking out one product at the time.
Step 2: Check the List of Ingredients
Look at the ingredients list of every single product and if it contains anything toxic consider getting rid of it. There are several websites that help you identify the toxic ingredients that are in most common known cosmetics, skin and hair care. Here are 2 that you can start with.
Chemicals of Concern
The Dirty Dozen cosmetic chemicals to avoid
https://davidsuzuki.org/queen-of-green/dirty-dozen-cosmetic-chemicals-avoid/
After this step, you most likely will have a considerably lower amount of stuff left over, this was a big step to declutter your bathroom, but we are not done yet.
Step 3 :Â Check the Expiry Dates
What you’ll do next is to check each product if it has an expiry date and if yes, whether that date is in the past or not. If it is, it’s up to you if you feel you need to get rid of it or not, it also depends on what product we are talking about.
What I am trying to do is make you aware that bathroom products (shampoo, conditioner, creams, oils, make-up) do have expiry dates, they go bad after a while. Especially if you buy products with natural ingredients, they often come without preservatives and don’t last as long as ‘regular’ ones.
After this step, you probably have reduced the number of products even more and now, you might all of a sudden have enough room to store it all and your bathroom doesn’t look cluttered anymore at all.
Hmm, how did this happen LOL
But wait! We are still not done
While writing this article I came across several blog posts suggesting, that the bathroom is more or less the last place you want to store shampoo, conditioner, and Co.
Why?
Because it’s usually warm and moist in there, while most products prefer cool, dry and dark places.This means you might want to rethink what you put in that under-the-sink-cabinet of yours, or in any of the other shelf and cabinets in your bathroom. The fridge is often suggested to keep nail polish and other cosmetics, but you might have to declutter the fridge first, before you have room in their.
Lastly, for everything that you do decide to keep in the bathroom, let’s explore some storage solutions that actually make sense.
Storage Tip: Drawers instead of cabinets
In general, I find it’s best to have drawers rather than cabinets to store things in. When we did our bathroom renovation we bought on purpose an under-sink cabinet with drawers. It’s so much easier to find things in drawers, you don’t have to go down on your knees and half-way crawl into the bottom shelf to find what you are looking for.
In addition, get some small baskets or containers to keep similar things together. This works even if you have shelves. If you do it right, you can pull out a basket or container like a drawer and easily find what you are looking for.
For inspiration, this page has some very cool and practical solutions:
What I usually do to get some inspiration is…. I check out Pinterest. But, careful, don’t come to me and say you wasted two hours getting lost on Pinterest, I know it is a “dangerous” platform. So set yourself a timer for however long you want to research and make sure you stay on track and only check out bathroom storage solutions.
Have fun and come back here and leave a comment about what you experienced while decluttering your bathroom.
You are so right about the chemicals – I did a clean out a couple of years ago, but I think some of that stuff has crept back into my house and ended up under my bathroom sink. I will definitely use this article to get rid of some of the bathroom clutter.
I find it quite hard to stay away from chemicals, also because one expert says this and another one the opposite. Sometimes I stand in the store, reading the ingredients but I don’t remember all the chemicals I want to avoid. Then I made myself a list of ingredients that I want to avoid and saved it to my iPhone.