I remember the first time I tried the Becca Skin Love Glow Glaze Stick. I swiped my beauty sponge across the top of the stick, tapped it onto the top of my right cheekbone and blurted out (to myself!), “What kind of sorcery IS this?!”

I couldn’t believe how beautiful it was and how beautiful it made me look! It was the most perfect highlight of sheen and glistening light without any of the shimmer, glitter, or sparkle that can often feel like you’re 21 again getting ready to dance to 50 Cent’s In Da Club, not 35 trying to live your best life looking like a gorgeous goddess.

In fact, I remember most of the moments I fell in love with a makeup product because it is also the moment I stopped using something else. Bye bye, Glossier Niteshine.

I truly believe that everyone should be in love with each makeup product in your makeup bag. Each product should make you feel absolutely beautiful and if it doesn’t, you shouldn’t be putting it on your face. I understand that sometimes you’re using something because it “works”, but we all know the difference between something that is kind of working and something that is delivering every single time. And if you don’t, it’s my mission to change that for you!

Through my Makeup Coaching Program I teach women how to identify what it is they like and dislike in beauty products so that they can make more informed choices and stop wasting their money on products that will let them down time and time again. For some women it’s an opportunity to refresh their makeup routine, but for others it is the beginning of a brand new makeup routine altogether.

Why is it so hard to start a new makeup routine?

Habits are difficult to break. Think about the first time you learned how to do something such as tying your shoes. Now think about the moment you learned there was another way to tie your shoes. Did it blow your mind? And more importantly, did you change how you tied your own shoes or just chalk it up to something surprising you didn’t know? If you’re a creature of habit like me, you kept on tying your shoes and moved on with your life.

The knowledge didn’t change your behavior, it just made you a bit more aware that there’s a variety of ways to do things in the world.

Whenever I buy a new tube of my favorite mascara, I have to physically throw away the tube I was using or I’ll never switch over to the newer tube. It sounds ridiculous, but I’ve become familiar with the one I already had. It’s been three months of getting attached and it’s almost like saying goodbye to a friend you met at summer camp: you’ve grown close!

According to a study Healthline.com featured in their post titled, How Long Does It Take For a New Behavior to Become Automatic? a 2009 study from the European Journal of Social Psychology claims it takes on average 66 days to adapt a new habit into a regular part of your routine. You spend an average of 90 days with your mascara, which means you are constantly forming a new habit each time you open a new tube. Imagine how that translates to the concealer you’ve been using since your older sister first introduced it to you in 10th grade!

So, just how do you get out of a makeup rut?

Step 1: Complete the eightyfive beauty Makeup Inventory by evaluating what you already have that you love, and cleaning out what you don’t need.

Step 2: Assess what’s left. Which makeup products are missing from your makeup collection? Which products do you only need to use seasonally?

Step 3: Put it back together. Work new products into your makeup routine one at a time.

If there’s one thing I learned from middle school science class, it’s the importance of having a control in every experiment: you can only change one thing at a time in order to see if that change had a positive or negative reaction.

What that means for changing up your makeup routine is that you can only update one product at a time. When you introduce several new items into your makeup routine it’s hard to tell if you don’t like an individual product or the combination of products.

Let’s go back to the Becca Skin Love Glow Glaze Stick. If I had tried a new foundation that day with the new Glow Glaze Stick and was unhappy with the application of the Glow Glaze Stick it might not have been that product at all! It could have been that the foundation wasn’t compatible with the Glow Glaze Stick.

Instead, I was using a foundation I was already familiar with and knew I loved. This was super important because changing my foundation wasn’t even a consideration. If I didn’t like the Glow Glaze Stick, I could simply return it and try something else. Let me put this another way. . .

If you brought a new dog into your home and it started ripping up your furniture, overturning every trash can, and biting your kids would you get rid of the dog or the furniture, trash cans, and kids? You would get rid of the dog.

If you’re on the hunt for a new mascara, try just the mascara without changing up anything else in your routine. If it smudges you’ll know it’s because it isn’t the formula for you. You won’t get confused trying to figure out if it’s the new concealer you also tried that is making your concealer smudge or if it really is the mascara that’s the culprit.

This is truly just the beginning of getting out of a makeup rut.

I’m sure at this point you may even have more questions:

• Am I wearing the wrong colors for my skintone?

• With the stores closed due to COVID-19, how do I know if I’ll like a product if I can’t swatch it?

• How do I know if something will look good on me?

I’ve put together a guide that will get you started on getting your makeup on FAST with just 5 products. It includes recommendations of exactly which products to use and they will work on everyone! I’ve even included a higher and lower budget option for each product with the links of where you can purchase everything.

Then go take a look at the eightyfive beauty talks videos for more easy and accessible makeup tips.