Organising & Storing Your Skin Care Collection

A skin care routine without a place for it to live is chaos.

Like that drawer that seems to exist in every teen boy’s bathroom – you know, the one where the handle is broken, they’ve crammed in just about every personal care product possible, and there’s hair gel and toothpaste and mystery grime on everything. No thanks.

Think about it, could you live without having a closet? Or clothes hangers? Just throwing your clothes wherever all around the house? How would you ever find anything, or know what’s clean or dirty? What about putting together a last-minute outfit? What a nightmare.

If you’re serious about getting better skin, you need to take your skin care storage just as seriously. That means creating a dedicated skin care area that meets all your needs.

Luckily, I’ve got the DIY steps you need below to spruce up your skin care space! It’s fun, totally worth it, and should take you barely any time at all. Let’s go!

The purpose of having a skin care storage system

Be it tucked in a small corner of the bathroom or an extensive range spread out across the shelves, the key goals of any skin care storage solution should be the same: to keep your products organised, hygienic and aesthetically appealing.

Organisation: To make doing your routine faster easier and frictionless. You’ll have a place for everything and everything in its place. Training yourself to go to this certain spot and do your routine is a trick to stick to your routine. Keeping your tools near your products as well instead of hidden in some drawer means everything’s within reach. Plus, it’ll reduce the chances you’ll run into a visibly expired product situation left unattended, like I had.

Hygiene: Keep everything clean, dry and cool for products’ longevity and skin’s health. No point spending money on products if they’re going to expire before you can use them, or worse, give you a bad reaction because of it.

Aesthetic appeal: It sounds shallow, but the more you like how your collection looks, the more it will help you stick to your routine and be proud of it! If you spend the time to personalise your skin care area, you’ll create a positive feedback loop of wanting to keep it clean and organised.

Step 1: Choose where to keep your skin care

Time to spend: 5 minutes

The first and most important job is to decide where you’re going to keep your skin care. Go on, walk into your bathroom and have a look around. Depending on what you’ve got available to you, there are a few basic options. Choose one of the following areas:

Shelves – This classic choice is great as everything can be kept up a height and front and centre – ideally at eye level. Either choose an existing shelf, or purchase and set up one yourself on a free wall(see Step 3). Be wary if you have a lot of glass-packaged products or are super clumsy, as one wrong move could send everything falling.

Drawers – Perfect for easy access to every product, keeping products away from sunlight, and a good choice if you have toddlers with wandering hands as you can put a lock on the drawer. It does make it harder to see labels, however.

Sinkside – Allows you to keep your bottles out and about where they can be seen, but not up a height so they’re less likely to fall. Not ideal for parents or toddlers with wandering hands, and be careful of bathroom debris building up around the bottom of products if they’re in the sink splash zone.

Step 2: Learn how to organise your skin care

Time to spend: 15 minutes

No matter what place in your home you choose, here are some of my best organisation tips for making your skin care spot a functional one. Go gather your products and lets get started.

Dedicate the space to skin care

Put all your products you use at least once a month into your chosen area. Anything else should go away into a cupboard where it’s cool and dark.

See how much space you’ll actually need, then make a note (or even a physical reminder like a pencil line) of where the ‘skin care zone’ will be. Don’t put any other things in that area, keep it just for your skin products.

Set out your routine in order

And better yet, have your routine step-by-step printed out beside your products. That way you’ll never have to think about what comes next, and you can start to work on auto pilot.

Group like products together

If you have more that one product for a certain step (say you rotate serums daily) then be sure to keep all your serums together. It makes swapping them around day to day easier.

Large products at the back

So you’re not knocking everything else over every time you reach to that tiny bottle at the back of the shelf.

Put things back where you found them!

Your work isn’t over after your initial set up. Every day, immediately replace the bottle or jar you’ve just used where it came from. This is going to keep your routine in order. Practice now: pick up; replace; pick up; replace.

Step 3: What to keep your skin care in

Time to spend: 30min

A good, well organised storage system will inherently have achieved our first two storage goals (organisation and hygiene). The third and final goal – aesthetic appeal – is where you need to tap into your personal creativity and go wild!

Depending on your dedication (and/or carpentry skills), tailoring your routine’s home to your exact tastes will make building and showing off your skin care collection something you’re excited about.

These solutions will offer the final touch in keeping things neat and tidy and pleasing to the eye:

Clean, light and basic

For those of you who love minimalism and just want something functional to keep your product in place look no further than some easy-to-clean dividers, shelves and racks.

Punchy (but not permanent)

Want something eye-catching and bright, but you’re living with your parents or somewhere you’re renting and can’t make any big changes to the bathroom? Or maybe you’re just strapped for cash and limited on ways to personalise your skin care area? Try a visually striking yet removable background pattern or LED lights.

Stickers

A fun sticker on the splashback (behind) where your products sit can make a huge difference to the area. You’ll be able to coordinate the colours with the other furnishings in the bathroom too.

I also love the idea of putting a chalkboard sticker behind where your products will sit and tracing an outline of the silhouette of everything there. That way, you’ll always know where to put something back!

Lights

Led strip lighting along the edges of your skin care area will visually separate it from the rest of your space and draw tons of attention!

Dark and modern

If you want to show off your stuff in a more subtle way, look no further. Modifying the base of your skin care station to a new texture will offer a sense of luxury and maturity and certainly be unique! My personal favourites are velvet or mirror finishes.

Velvet

Cut to size and glue a piece of velvet to the base of your drawer or along the shelf or area where you skin care sits.

Mirror

Find a mirror that’s the right size for the area and glue it in place. Otherwise, you can find mirror-finish plastic or even reflective stickers.

I think these all look extra good against a black shelving unit or drawer – consider painting something you’ve got already like the inside of a drawer, or a premade black storage option.

If you’ve got a neat skin care setup, I want to see it! Share photos with me below.