I tried fitting all my beauty waste into a mason jar for a year, here’s how it went

The low-waste glam challenge.

A few things will happen when you tell your friends you’re trying to fit an entire year’s worth of beauty waste into a mason jar. Firstly, they’ll assume you’ve joined a wellness cult. Then they’ll ask if this means you’ve ‘stopped showering or something.’ They’ll proceed to send you memes about skincare hoarding for the next twelve months.

To be fair, I sort of asked for it. This all started the way most of my bad-but-noble ideas do: on a Sunday night, half-asleep in bed, watching a YouTube video of a woman with glowing skin who claimed that her entire year’s worth of household waste fit in a jar the size of my takeaway smoothie.

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I watched her twirl a bamboo toothbrush like a magician’s wand and I thought, ‘I could never do that.’ Then I realised my complete inability to store a year’s worth of waste in a jar probably meant I should do it, but with a beauty twist. Yes, I would attempt to mason-jar my beauty waste for 12 months, and this is exactly what happened. 

What even is beauty waste?

Beauty waste encompasses all the little tubes, tubs, droppers, stickers, seals, foil packets, cotton rounds, sheet mask wrappers, mascara wands, expired lipsticks, sample pots, and bits of sponge found in the depths of your makeup bag. Put simply, if it ends up in the bin, it counts.

The rules (self-imposed, aggressively enforced)

1. Only landfill waste goes in the jar. Compostable, recyclable and refillable beauty products are innocent until proven guilty.

2. Beauty waste only. Let’s not get wild. My oat milk cartons and coffee filters stay out of this.

3. If it shimmers and can’t be repurposed, it’s micro-plastic in a ball gown, into the jar it goes.

The inventory

I started by doing a stocktake of my beauty cabinet. Have you ever sat cross-legged on your bathroom floor at 11pm, lit only by the harsh glow of LED vanity bulbs and pulled out every single beauty product you own? Don’t. This wasn’t a detox, this was a reckoning.

Here’s what I found:

17 lip products in shades ranging from ‘Nude Beige’ to ‘Dead Victorian Child’. Four dry shampoos, all nozzle-crusted and vaguely smelling of aerosol regret. Two jade rollers, one of which was still in its Goop-branded cage. A glitter highlighter I bought off the back of a friend’s rave review and wore once to an event I wasn’t invited to again. A plethora of half-used, most likely expired foundations, concealers, powders and creams. 

Month one: Delusional confidence

I started strong. Like, influencer-on-a-press-trip strong. I swapped my shampoo and conditioner for solid bars with charming names like ‘Ocean Breeze’ and ‘Volumising Cherry’. 

I declined samples like I was allergic to joy. I washed my face with jojoba oil purchased from a health food store that also sells kombucha starter kits and yoga mats shaped like leaves. I was beaming, mostly with self-righteousness.

Sure, some swaps were… less seamless. The refillable concealer came in three shades, none of them mine. My baking soda toothpaste tablets disintegrated into sadness. The handmade mascara I bought at a craft market smudged like a heartbroken poet. But overall, I was optimistic. I was glowing (or at least, not actively breaking out). I was a woman on a mission.

Month three: Things begin to unravel

I ran out of concealer and refused to repurchase the same wrongly-matched shade. I scraped the bottom of my tinted SPF with a cotton bud with fear, as it had been sold out for the past three weeks. 

I attempted to make blush from beetroot powder and made my face smell like an earthy side salad. At one point, I stared at a serum I didn’t even like and muttered, “You will last until December if it kills us both.”

The jar filled slowly. A broken compact, a mascara wand that resembled a tiny medieval weapon, one sad, wilting false eyelash from a wedding I should not have attempted zero-waste glam for. It was a dark time. 

Month four: Social repercussions

As it turns out, nobody wants to hear about your compostable dental floss while they swatch holographic eye crayons at Sephora. “I just want one fun thing,” a friend said, clutching a glitter palette. “Landfill is not fun,” I whispered. I wasn’t invited to the next girls’ beauty night.

All of a sudden, it was all I could think about: beauty waste. Even the thought of buying a new lip balm sent me spiralling into eco-guilt. When one of my colleagues pulled out her perfectly respectable Lanolips, I felt my spine shatter as I heard myself say: “Oh, if you’re looking for a more sustainable lip gloss, have you tried coconut oil and honey?”

She blinked. No. No, she had not. I could feel myself projecting my beauty waste anxiety onto people without even meaning to. It was involuntary, automatic. And deep down, I knew it had to stop.

August epiphany (and a leaky atomiser)

Somewhere in late winter, I found myself standing barefoot in the kitchen, trying to refill a metal perfume atomiser with fragrance oil. The pipette refused to cooperate. The oil sloshed. I smelled like my French grandmother’s glove drawer.

And then, clarity. I like beauty products. Neigh, I love them. I love the serums that overpromise and underdeliver. I like the foundation that makes me look like I slept. I like feeling, even briefly, like the best version of myself (the version who arrives at places on time with a red lip and owns matching socks).

So I changed the brief. This wasn’t about punishment, it was about ‘conscious consumption’ – that deeply unsexy phrase that means ‘buy less, think more.’

So I bought the new makeup and skincare, but I bought better quality and less of it. I bought local. I emailed brands to ask about their recycling policies and got replies that made me feel like I didn’t need to use olive oil as moisturiser to make a difference. I started opting for brands like Emma Lewisham and Ursa Major, companies whose internal policies actually lived up to their ethical aesthetic.

The final count

At the end of 12 months, my mason jar contained: two mascara tubes, expired but determined. Two foundation caps I couldn’t recycle. The foil seal from a serum that made no difference whatsoever. A lip gloss I loathed but finished out of spite. A broken blush compact from 2014 that survived three house moves. Cotton tips and rounds, pipettes, plastics and other bits of packaging.

Was it perfect? Please. Did I cheat? A little (I did pinch the complimentary toiletries from my stay in the Blue Mountains). Did I do better than I ever thought I could? Actually, yes.

The good, the bad and the learnings

Solid bar products are low-key genius. Shampoo, cleanser, moisturiser, conditioner – if it looks like soap, it’s secretly magic (if stored correctly!). Ultimately, my sensitive skin steers me towards the Cetaphil Gentle Cleansing Bar and the QV Wash Cleansing Bar.

Refillable everything. Yes, they smell weird (usually products contain fewer essential oils and artificial fragrances). No, you won’t die.

Double-duty products are your new religion. Lip-to-cheek balms, bronzer and blush as eyeshadow, mascara that doubles as brow gel (special shoutout to the Clarins Lash and Brow Double Fix Mascara, my mum has used this product for years and turns out she was onto something).

Nobody needs six nude lipsticks. But, God, I missed them.

Zero-waste beauty isn’t always inclusive. The desire to have less water also means fewer manufactured products and hence fewer shade selections.

Natural isn’t always better. If you’re someone who’s sensitive to certain flowers or grass, chances are 100 per cent botanical oil might not agree with you. 

Final thoughts

The mason jar was never the point. It’s just a metaphor, like a capsule wardrobe or finally understanding what toner does. I’ll never be a fully zero-waste goddess who makes blush from rose petals.

But I’ll pause before impulse-buying another serum I saw on TikTok. I’ll finish my lipsticks. I’ll keep my reusable cotton pads and I’ll go back to regular toothpaste because my god, those tooth tabs were bad. That’s not perfection but it’s something. And honestly? The jar looks kind of cute on my shelf.

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