Cleaning up Makeup Geek’s Sparklers has been an ongoing effort, because it’s just in every crevice, including some of my camera/lighting equipment. I thought I got most of it initially, but I was wrong.
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I dropped an open jar of loose powder in my bathroom a few weeks ago. Sigh…
Oh no, Christine!!! That sounds like the “gift” (curse?) that just WON’T stop giving! You grief, that is.
Mine was a toss up between two things that happened pretty close together. Last summer, I ordered MAC Royally Riotous, and when it finally arrived 2 days later, it more closely resembled melted chocolate! I was so upset, because my worst fears regarding ordering a lipstick during an AZ summer were realized. Called MAC CS, they sent a replacement immediately! No charge, and even though they said I could just toss the gooey one, I decided to send it back to them.
The other incident involved a FAVORITE nail polish, OPI She’s Golden. Had it for years, used it roughly twice a year. This time when I went to open it, it was stuck. So I decided to use my silicone oven mitt to get a better grip? Bad idea!!! It turned it alright. The top of bottle broke off and my kitchen counter still has some She’s Golden stuck there!
Aw man, that nail polish accident is the worst! I used to have the same problem. Now, whenever mine get stuck, I just dunk the cap-end of the polish bottle in some hot water for a minute, which melts the dried nail polish that keeps it stuck.
Right?!? And it was a LE nail polish at that! Luckily I had a similar shade of a Nyx n.p. in a similar, but not as pretty a shade, so I dumped out most of the Nyx one, then poured what was left of OPI She’s Golden into the Nyx bottle. Managed to save half a bottle, maybe? Thanks for the hot water tip, Kimberly! Funny that I think to do that to that to jars of food, but hadn’t thought of it for n.p., LoL ?
Lol, as soon as I read the question, I knew what your answer would be. 😀
Well, thanks to oily lids and a wet waterline, most of my disasters are related to eye makeup. And on top of this, my eyes have also been puffy and watery lately, thanks to spring allergies and a cold. But I couldn’t resist trying on some colorful new shadows that came in the mail, and wore them along with mascara/liner, and within a few hours, everything was smudging, creasing, and running. Uh, don’t know WHAT I was thinking. So it’s basically concealer and boring beige shadow until everything gets back to normal
I have Huntington’s disease and it causes my hands to move when I don’t want them to. And I drop everything. Every time I put makeup on my brushes jump right out of my hand and land on the floor. Anyway I would say the worst thing for me is dropping breakable things like eyeshadows and highlighters. Even when I get them brand new out of the box they still break !? The worst thing that broke was my MUFE artist shadow in black matte. It’s still in my carpet and it took forever to clean up because of the pigmentation. I had to clean the sink with bleach and I still saw it for weeks!
I have Ehlers-Danlos (H3) Syndrome and often get funny cramps which leads me to drop things often, which is why I most often do almost everything from bed, and over a towel! ?. Although, I did drop a red lipstick on my pretty light blue sheets that I had just bought. Sigh.
That’s a great idea!
Clinique’s chubby lip balm crayons. The cap dislodged itself in my backpack, coating the bottom of my bag, my wallet and my files in reddish lipbalm. The cap is still really sticky. Never bringing that out with me again ):
Worst I’ve done is drop brought pink nail polish off of a table and could only watch as it spun spraying pinky, carpet ruining lacquer in every direction… Yeah, beige carpet hides nothing.
Nail polish disasters are the worst! I definitely feel your pain, Kjellsea!?
I was out with my friend on a Sephora trip and we were headed to dinner but I had a bright red lipstick smear all along my sweater and jeans – I’d leaned against the counter and there must have been lipstick there or something. I had to go home and change before we could go back out. I had to wash both twice and treat them heavily with OxiClean each time to get the stains out.
Just had one today! 🙁 Spritzed on some MAC Fix+ to freshen up my face but apparently my new BB cream underneath didn’t agree and started pilling up reallllly bad.
I’m not sure which of these was the most recent but here you go.
For me it’s usually my skin getting so oily that my foundation starts to separate, my mascara running and me getting seriously bad panda eyes or me applying liquid eyeliner so badly that all I can do is take my eye makeup off and start over! It’s even more annoying that when the first two things happen no one EVER says anything to let me know. I’ll come back from sorting it out after finally noticing and everyone will swear blind that they didn’t see it. Embarrassing! ?
That was my fault: Yesterday I managed to drip foundation down the front of my shirt right before I was supposed to go somewhere.
That was the product’s fault: I got the bhCosmetics Foil Eyes palette, and half the pans fell out when I opened it. I contacted bhCosmetics customer service and sent pictures, and they sent a new one. The replacement did the same thing. They offered me a refund, so CS did right by me. However…last I checked, they still had not posted my review, though they posted a positive review I had for another product right away. Usually they do post poor reviews, so I hope it was an oversight.
I was trying to use a loose powder (Dior) that came with an attached screen. I was having difficulty getting enough powder on the kabuki brush i was using so I had this brilliant idea to pry the screen/cover off. All was good until I almost had it off and the entire container flipped out of my hand. It was one of those moments when everything seems like it’s going in slow motion as I watched it fly up, flip mid air, and disburse the powder all over the floor, vanity, and me!
Oooohhhh no, not the Dior….(that’s the soundtrack running thru my head?). What a bummer!
I know what you mean by moments passing in slow motion. Yst i was making cold coffee for the kids. I blended everything together to get lots of froth. I opened the lid of the jar and reached back to pick a spoon, to taste it from. As i turned back, i saw my 3 year old press the blender switch – while the lid of the jar was still off! Everything happened in slow motion! Needless to say – I had cold coffee all over the place!!
Losing coffee is almost as bad as losing makeup! 😉
A few months ago I received sample sizes of a lipstick and matching gloss (Kir Royale, by Bite Beauty). I’m not sure why I did this — I don’t usually wear gloss — but I really liked the color — I applied the gloss over top of the lipstick. Then I dealt with a couple of things before heading to work. Fortunately, I happened to glance in the car mirror on my way to work. Somehow, there were spots/smears of bright, vivid lip color scattered over the bottom half of my face! I pulled into a parking lot and dealt with it. I was so glad that I always carry tissues, cotton buds, concealer, powder, and a couple of good brushes with me. I just really wasn’t thinking — Bite’s lipstick (old and new formula both) has a slight tendency to bleed at the corners of my mouth anyway, so putting a gloss on top of it was just plain stupid. I guess now I’ll remember not to do that again!
Fran, if you have a gloss you love, you can try just applying it in the center of your lips (obv. over a lipstick). That way, you can use it as an accent (a drop of gloss in the center makes your lips look fuller) and reduce the bleeding risk.
i dropped my makeup bag recently and i had a pressed powder bronzer that cracked and got EVERYWHERE. all of my makeup, including the inside of my bag was the color of my bronzer. i had to wash my makeup bag and clean everything off but now i just use whatever’s left of that bronzer (since it’s super lose and powdery now the application seems better…?)
Most of my “disasters” these days have more to do with not being able to find stuff I know I have “somewhere” than with actual product fails or things that make a big mess. I spent ages looking for a small concealer brush, only to find it at the bottom of my little basket where I keep stuff I’m currently using/planning to use. But I wasted a good hour or more looking here, there and everywhere for it and I’d basically given it up for lost/accidentally discarded!
That’s me on a daily basis! I know where I have it, I know where it should be, but it refuses to appear. This is especially true for eyeliners and lipsticks (I probably should find a better way to organize!). Of course, this is always guaranteed to happen when I’m in a hurry.
Dealing with my skin after a bad foundation sucked all the moisture out of my skin and broke me out like no other. So far it’s taken actual Vaseline on my driest spots to make any difference–normal serums and moisturizers aren’t doing enough. Fun times man.
Yeah, Glitter for makeup or crafts I usually find like 6 months later after use somewhere. It does suck when it get into your equipment.
My valentines look kept cracking because I layered too much product on my skin… Thankfully it wasn’t a cosplay look that a needed to wear for a full day. lol
My daughter getting hold of the NYX eyeshadow stick in “Black Bean” and drawing all over the floor.
Hope you have a tiny vacuum, like they use for computers. My latest was one that is not uncommon. The ‘wiper ring’ in the mascara gets caught in the brush end, so a huge unusable blob was on the brush. I just uttered a few of the usual expletives, and put it away. I will clean it eventually, but if anyone has any bright ideas…… Since it’s black, probably ought to just toss it. It’s the aggro factor that makes me want to fix it. And the fact that it’s not particularly old, even for mascara.
I tried to line my lips beyond my lip line with red liner. No bueno.
I was also in a hurry to do a quick eye look one night and used Sidecar from my UD Naked palette. BIG mistake. So much fallout I had to completely redo everything because it muddied my foundation.
Grrr, Sidecar. It’s such a beautiful color in the pan, but I think it is the absolute worst I have ever used regarding fallout. My current method is: look at Sidecar, apply something else. Haha!
Haha! Honestly, I have little love for my UD palette. Every single time I use it, I wind up having to “fix” the application. Yet I still reach for it because the colors are beautiful. It was my first “Sucker” purchase.
Sidecar is usable over a tacky base. I am posting my review of Milk’s Bridge later today on my blog…anyway, if you’re near a Sephora, I suggest going and checking it out. Bridge isn’t meant as a base but I tested it as one (after my product test) just to see what it would do. You can actually finger apply any fall-out fail shade over it and it holds.
In my teens, a woman at a beauty counter lined my lips that way. When I saw myself in the mirror, I wanted to die! ?
OMGoodness, I had that problem until I foiled it with Hard Candy primer, was too wet for regular primer, and when you dip the brush in it, it holds as if you used glue, without the peeling or cracking and no fall out. For me, it’s perfect.
Oh no, that does sound like a true disaster! A big mark against buying the Sparklers, if they made *that* much mess! I haven’t really had big makeup disasters, but probably the most common mistakes I have made are going out with foundation that’s too yellow/orange for me, mascara and eyeshadow just smudging or sliding off cos of oily lids, before I discovered waterproof mascara and eyelid primer!
This is hardly a “disaster” I guess, but I found a seller on Ebay with department store display refills of some disco’d Becca products for a really good price (bronzer, blush, pressed shimmer powders), so I ordered several sets – I am going to have a total of 10 pans, I think. Well, I didn’t realize how HUGE they were going to be; the first batch arrived last night and they are about 2.5/ 6cm inches in diameter! That means I can’t even fit 2 “vertically” in a large z palette. I literally do not know where I am going to put them- I can’t keep them in the little plastic tabs they are in because it’s fragile (and ugly), and if I get an XL z palette, which I haven’t even checked the size on yet, it won’t fit in the drawer of the new organizer I bought to finally get my makeup stash in shape 🙁 Did not think this one through!!
Wayne Goss on YouTube just posted about an alternate to Z pallets that he likes better and are even less $. Don’t know if this is any help to you.
I will check that out, thanks! I was trying to brainstorm today, and I think my backup plan is to put a magnetic board on the backside of the cabinet door where I house all of my makeup, then I can just stick all of the big pans to it- kind of like a big free-form z palette ?
I looked up the Wayne goss thing. The pallets are my kit co in UK. They are not available in the United States. It says right on their website! That’s a shame I wanted in on that too !
A dark tinted lipbalm lost the cap in my bag yesterday. EVERYTHING has dark berry stains.
I received a sample of Tarte’s Lights Camere Lashes mascara In my Feb Play! box. It says it’s one of the “bestselling ” mascaras. So, I figured, Yay, it has to be great. OMG..so flaky. I was in a hurry and it was all over my face. I do my eyes before foundation. But it was still so hard to get the flakes off. I had them on my face all day . The girl at the bank asked me if I had been crying! lol. I ptiched the sample right away. I can’t believe they put that in the Play! box! I really did love the brush design. But, the formula was just bad.
My becca champagne pop broke twice… While sitting in a drawer? i heard these powders are soft but this is ridiculous?
The same thing happened to me with the same product and the balm Mary Lou Manizer. I pushed them down to get them all powdery and then I carefully added alcohol to make it a thick consistency. Then I usually use wax paper on top to press it down. Take the paper off and let it dry overnight. This works with eyeshadows, blush and bronzers.
It’s been awhile..I don’t want to jinx it.. 😛
I was depotting some old Lorac single eyeshadows, and a black one shattered on my black desk. I didn’t realize how much I missed cleaning up until I got into bed and realized there were black streaks all over my sheets and pillow!
My last disaster was just a few days ago when I knocked my bottle of Argan oil over and spilled almost half. It was pretty much a new bottle. Then I had to clean it up with lightning speed because my dog apparently loves the taste of Argan oil. Who knew?
OMG CHRISTINE! It’s in your equipment??? THAT’S HORRIBLE. Gah. I am so sorry. I think my last makeup incidents were pretty mild. A month ago another actor accidentally bumped my traincase and a Z-Palette popped out, taking a small chunk of one of my MUFE shadows out (but really a minimal bit. Just a tiny nick by the edge of the pan). Then last night I was showing a friend a Fyrinnae shade (Mephisto) to demonstrate their duochromes and of course it’s over-filled so a tiny bit is now colorfully decorating a small bit of my desk in a lovely red-blue streak.
I dropped a mascara wand on my carpet. I used Bioderma to remove the stain and it worked pretty well.
The new Bourjois brow mascara.
Normally I tend to keep potentially risky new purchases testing to weekends. But everyday I use a brow mascara from a different company to create a more natural look after i get some powder eyeshadow in my brows so I thought it will not be a huge change.
It was. The Bourjois product was new and watery so it went not only on the brow hairs (loads of it) but also under them on my skin and all around. I had to clean up the whole area and go through foundation, concealer and the brow process again. Which takes a while…
I love all other Bourjois stuff I have and I am sure the brow product will be good, but now I am afraid to use it. And yes, I did do it carefully and the previous brush I used was the same size.
Other than that, once in a while I deal with wrong foundation color (when changing seasons), too much blush or too much dark eyeshadow, but I can work my way out of these.
Kevin Aucoin cream blush duo popped open in my handbag. Hot pink all over EVERYTHING and I wasted all that expensive product.
Just this past Sunday I tried layering Becca’s matte primer over Derma E’s sunblock. Both products can give you a white cast if you’re not careful, so I was hoping against hope that layering would still work somehow. Nope! The combination turned glue-white on my face! They’re both reallllllllly great products though!
The 1st YSL oil-in-tin, the cap was not totally closed in my purse (or it was defective), and when I cleaned it with a tissue, there still have some product stucked under the YSL “ring” decoration, so there are still a little product coming when I look at it a little while later.
I didn’t put the tube under water to wash it cause I wasn’t sure if the tube was defective.
But I love the product enough to repurchase it.
It keep my lips moisturised and tint my lips to look like baby lips, sent like tropical fruits. The best natural and young looking lip product ever imo !
Now I’m on my 4th tube and I only had the issue with the 1st one. Love “Peach me love”. Hope it will never be discontinued.
Tint-in-Oil* 😛
I knocked an open bottle of Smashbox BB Water onto the tile floor of the bathroom. It didn’t break, but splattered everywhere. It took serious effort to get it out of the grout of the new, unsealed floor. Not to mention the wasted product.
Well this isn’t so much a spill type of thing… but Nars Sheer Glow and I had a terrible time a few weeks back. I broke out in an allergic reaction in under 12 hours. That was not fun.
I made the mistake of wearing my favorite beige shirt while doing lip swatches for my blog. I forgot they were on my arm and pressed it against the front of my shirt. sigh. I was so annoyed with myself that I ended up not even posting the picture.
The other one would be me using Revlon ColorStay thinking it would be ok to use for literally just 20 minutes while I took a photo. Nope. Just the 20 minutes broke me out so bad… I hate that foundation.
This wasn’t the product’s fault, because I KNOW better: I used a new foundation for the first time on a date night (Stila’s super-dooper long wearing liquid) It looked fantastic for the first little while, and I went out feeling all nice and pretty and confident. Halfway through dinner, I excused myself to the ladies room, and caught a look at myself in the mirror… an Oompa Loompa was looking back at me! Granted, a lot of foundations tend to oxidize on me, hence the “I Know Better!” part. But that stuff was awful to the extreme…. my face still feels hot from embarassment just thinking about it LOL!
Hahaha! Hope your date didn’t say anything!
A few weeks back I tripped over my jerk face cat while walking from my vanity into the bathroom with my Cindy-Lou Manizer compact in hand, and it flew open and the entire cake fell out! Luckily most of it landed on the rug and came apart into big chunks, so I managed to salvage about 3/4 of it.
(it arrived broken when I bought it, and when I fixed it the cake didn’t adhere back to the pan very well, so it moves around)
How funny would it have been, if it had landed on the cat! ??
I love your cat’s new nickname!
Oh, jerk face is the /nicest/ thing I call him, but I thought I’d keep my language clean 🙂
A few years back I lost an entire Sugarpill loose shadow that way, the only time I’ve ever had to give my cat a bath! He was covered in purple!
I broke the same thing. I made a comment on how to fix it. Break it down in the container and add rubbing alcohol carefully until it’s a thick paste. I take wax paper and press over the product to get the air bubbles out and set it. Then take the paper off and let it sit overnight. It works on bronzers, eyeshadow, blush so you can fix those too
Oh yeah, I’ve done that before, but thank you!
Search these comments I posted way to fix these things. The same happened to me. Break it down to a powder. Slowly add rubbing alcohol and make a thick paste. Take wax paper and put it on top and press down not too hard but hard enough to set it flat. Dry overnight !
This works for eyeshadows blush and bronzer.
Mine isn’t makeup but fragrance related: I broke off a corner of a square shaped perfume bottle. The bottle was fairly new and I lost a lot of product. 🙁 I still use it, but it doesn’t spray as well as it used to.
hahaha i like everyone’s answers! My worst disaster is when people rushed me to complete my make up then I ended up sticking the mascara brush into my eye and all heck broke loose! then I had to wipe my undereyes, re-apply other stuff as well as wipe away the fountain of tears from a single eye…It was too frustrating LOL!
Mine was wearing OCC’s lip tar in Technopagan out of my house. It’s on my car seats. It got on my clothing. It was on my taco I had for lunch which made it get on my chin when trying to eat it. It got on my hands and on my kids when they tried helping me clean it up. It was just a hot mess.
My NARS All Day Luminous Weightless Foundation suddenly turned into a complete watery mess in the bottle. It wasn’t even useable in any way. It’s not like it was an old bottle either! I might have owned it 4 months.
Using a “paint-on” lipstick that I get one area of my lip too dark, usually below the cupid’s bow of my upper lip, and I can’t get it to even out!
Not a spillage or breakage, but just a big mess on my face!
I dropped my ELF Illuminating Palette on my ceramic floor. Only one casualty. I just the broken quarter into an empty round pill box.
It’s been a while but I had a bottle of foundation drop and shatter on the tile floor. It stained my grout and no amount of bleach could get it off.
A big thanks to Claire for a great question! It was a very entertaining read!
My worst was a newly bought expensive cleansing facial peel in a glass bottle that I dropped on the bathroom floor. It took awhile to clean up. But I can understand about the glitter Christine – it just gets into everything.
In a unusually intense rush in the morning, I used dark blue eyeliner instead of usual brown eyebrow pencil. Didn’t catch it until in the car mirror en route to work. Tough to get off while at stoplights, but I was motivated to say the least. Got it all and filled in with spare eyebrow product I keep at the office (though I was mildly anxious all day). That’s a line of sight into my dotage I don’t care to revisit…
I’ve had the nail polish incident when I dropped a bottle of OPI’s I’m not a Waitress on my favorite pair of light blue jeans and the red went all over it. Needless to say they became a pair just to wear around the house. The last one was when I dropped my Z Palette of Makeup Geek’s foiled shadows and they all broke to smithereens! It’s hard to get foiled shadows off of pink bathroom tile.
I sharpened a NARS retractable lip pencil.
Since I was in a hurry and now mad with myself, I put it on anyway and got an angry case of chapped lips from the now jagged edge of what was a lovely product.
These responses are so funny! I think I have done them all, and been there with you.
Thanks Christine for the humor!
I did the same with a NARS eyeliner. May try to smooth it with a nailfile as it isn’t too bad.
Great idea Susan!
Thanks I will try that!
Susan,
Thanks so much. I filed the top of the jagged edge until it was smooth and now it works better!. I did use tiny scissors to clip off the bad points. It still isn’t the same, but learning how to save a favorite product is great help. Thanks again!
So happy that it helped. I still haven’t done mine.
I usually can count on having at least one disaster once a month. But one of the worst was dropping my Guerlain bronzer on my marble floor……..ugh, try getting bronzer out of the grout . It was a no go. Another famous one was buying Kiko milano mineral powder. I went to open the packaging and pulled the cover off the sealed powder. Mess, white powder every place. But hey it happens and it never changed the love I have for makeup.
Revlon Colorstay Whipped has the most godawful packaging I’ve ever seen for a cream foundation. First of all, the jar is gigantic. It’s over twice as big as my old fave, Covergirl Clean Whipped, but barely holds any more product (which ended up being a good thing). The jar’s giant, and won’t fit in a makeup bag. If it were prettier, it’d be almost understandable as luxe packaging, but it’s just utilitarian and HUGE.
It comes with an insert to kind of keep everything in place in transit, which is so big and has a place that juts out to grab it–but has a giant crease that holds product. This stuff is thick enough that I couldn’t get it off the insert easily, so I just left it there, but it was annoying. But it became a blessing in disguise.
Because the inside of the lid has the most idiotic design flaw: the threaded area that screws onto the jar is very thin. So you’ve got this huge jar with a huge diameter lid, but the part that is most important, is a tiny thin insert into the lid. Someone on reddit even warned me this was prone to cracking when I was complaining about the jar’s size in the first place. Didn’t matter! As careful as I was, it still cracked on me and split into tons of pieces. I rubber banded the jar shut until I had time to wash out an empty jar of the Covergirl that I had just luckily tossed into my trash can that week. So now that’s where the Revlon lives now.
The worst part? I like the product, but I don’t see myself ever buying it again. So poorly designed. So, so, so dumb.
I spilled a full scent diffuser, liquid with reeds all over the top of a new vanity. Removed a fair amount of finish and ruined a new shirt.
My Dachshund got my makeup bag out of my purse and proceeded to eat my Girlactik liquid eye liner, my Clinique Black Honey Almost Lip Stick, and My NARS Matte lip pencil before I heard her. She apparently likes the same products I do. I am just glad I caught her before she got to anything else. They were all more than 70-75% used, so it wasn’t a huge loss, but of course they were all pretty dark colors and long wearing, so I had to use makeup remover, hair spray, and Clorox Clean up to remove it from the wood floors, her bed, and the couch and pillows. At least she had good taste, and the Black Honey lip stick looked quite good with her.
fixing my kvd thunderstruck eyeshadow. i dropped it while getting ready for a concert and it was one of those moments where it landed upside down [but closed] and i was so afraid to pick it up and turn it over!!!! i fixed it but it messed with the formula in my opinion. but i’ll keep using it until it’s done and take good care of my new one!