Makeup Tools on a Budget

From Arts and Craft Stores
Visit your local arts and crafts supply store for lots of great tools to use for makeup. Artist palettes work well for getting creative with mixing lip and eye colors. Particularly if you have a graveyard of colors you don’t like and you want to mix them together to tone them down or create new shades of your own. Just cut a little tip of the lipstick off and place on a palette to mix with other colors to create new colors, with foundation to tone colors down, or eye shadows to create completely new creative colors. Do the same with eye shadows-just place some on the palette and mix to your heart’s desire with any other makeup medium you can come up with. For an even cheaper way to mix colors together, use what I use for my paintings to mix colors-an empty Styrofoam egg carton. It gives you a dozen pockets for mixing and it’s disposable-and closable to save for later.

Paint and tool boxes make great makeup boxes with lots of compartments to store any kind of item. And artist brushes come in hundreds of shapes and sizes to choose from. Instead of paying a high price for good makeup brushes, look for high quality artist brushes on sale (Michaels Arts and Crafts Supply often has 50% off sales for brushes) and stock up on different kinds-many are shaped very much like makeup brushes. The natural bristles work best since acrylic or nylon brushes don’t hold most makeup well. Boar or camel’s hair brushes work best. Don’t forget to get a few stiff, pointy brushes for lining lips and eyes or feathering brows in. If you don’t like the long handle, simply saw some of it off and sand the end a bit.

Tired of getting hairspray on your face or shoulders? Don't spend a lot of money on a specialty hairspray shield, just use a sheet of clear plastic. You can see through it so you can view what you're spraying. Reuse the plastic from packages you would throw away and cut them to size, use them several times, then toss. You can probably find lots of items you could use for it when you look around the house.
Beauty and the Budget at VirtualBookWorm