Reviving Lip Gloss

One of the biggest and most obvious rules of frugality is to use up every little bit of the things you buy.  Most of the time, even if a container feels empty, there are at least three more days worth of product in there--maybe more.  Yes, at first you may feel like a crazy person for cutting open a tube of toothpaste or something similar, but I prefer to think of the situation as what would I do if I was all out of product X, but couldn't make it to the store for a couple days.  Plus, you paid for the stuff, might as well use it.

Today's story is about lip gloss.  It has been a long winter, and I have been going through lip gloss like crazy it seems. I have a really bad habit of washing my lip gloss, so I've made some executive decisions in that area recently.  For the home, I buy Eos lip balm:

The reason I buy it is because I would never accidentally put something that shape into my pocket, and therefore I don't have to worry about washing it.  Also, it sits up quite nicely.  I bought one for my desk, my reading chair and my coffee table so that way I always have some lip balm at my reach.

On thing that is weird about this container as well is that the lip balm itself, sits in a sort of rounded cone on top of a lip gloss grate that holds it up.  Below the lip gloss, is just empty space, so as you use it, more and more gets smooched down through the grate until it looks like this:

There's still a lot of lip gloss in there, it's just really hard to get out.  Thankfully, the container comes apart quite easily (with a pair of pliers), which leaves you with 7 small triangles of perfectly good lip gloss that are a real pain to actually apply.

What I ended up doing was taking those triangle, melting them in a ramekin on the heating element of my coffee pot, and then pouring the liquid back into the bottom half of the lip gloss container.  It took about five minutes total, and now I have enough convenient, useable lipgloss to last at least another two weeks.  I save myself a trip to the store where I will inevitably forget to buy the one thing I went there for, and I get the smug satisfaction of MacGyvering something.

SCORE!