The slow season is a great time to take a look at your kit and evaluate how you can condense your products to save space and lighten your load. Today, let’s talk about all of the different options you have for depotting your bulky products into lightweight, manageable containers! This will be a multi-part post where we focus in-depth on each type of product. First up, liquids!

Depotting your products has several advantages, not limited to space and weight. Imagine if your kit were stolen or damaged. If you were keeping full-size products in your kit, you’d be out all of that product vs if you were carrying a smaller portion of that product in a different container. In that case, you’d still have a portion of that product in your inventory at home and can still work! Winning!

Liquid Products

Cases with narrow wheelbases will do you dirty at every corner.  Trust.

Remember when your over-stuffed Pro Stack case wiped out when you took a corner 4 times faster than you knew was good for you and all 78lbs of it crashed on its side? That was probably when it happened. You can smell it — the rosey, herbal aroma of several ounces of a $12 Mario Badescu Rose Water Facial Spray seeping into the nooks and crannies of your kit, dampening the layer of cosmetic dust that covers the bottom and creating a stubborn, gooey shimmery paste that only Parian Spirit is going to make a dent on.

The Grumpy — you have it.

Now, on to trying to open your kit in front of your client and pretend that everything isn’t wet.

Liquid foundations, highlighters, moisturizers, toners, and skin prep can be depotted into a variety of containers to make them more compact. Other advantages are to limit spillable quantities so if something does happen, only 1 or 2 ounces of (sometimes expensive) product escapes instead of 8, 12, or 24 ounces.

Here are some ideas for super liquidy products:

	PET Cylinder travel containers from MUJI.  These are great for micellar waters, liquid makeup removers, toners, and anything else you don’t NEED to spray on the face, but would maybe use on a cotton round.
Victor Amos has some fantastic posts about how he condenses his pro artist kit.  Here are the MUJI bottles in action!
	Spray Bottle, Natural with Pump and Cap, Clear These spray bottles come in a couple of different sizes and are amazing for facial sprays, chemical exfoliators (like Sex-A-Peel), or toners you’d prefer to spray vs swipe on.  You could even depot smaller quantities of setting sprays to give to clients or for small jobs.
	Bottle, Fine Mist Sprayer and Overcap These standard PET spray bottles are great for carrying small quantities of sanitizers and brush cleansers.  Be cautious with solvent-type brush cleansers in PET bottles, however.  They will deteriorate the plastic in a short amount of time.  For those, I recommend an HDPE bottle (LUSH’s toners come in these) for things like Parian Spirit, as it can withstand the chemical properties for longer.

 
Another advantage to depotting things like serums and lotions is that it helps with your product control. You will rarely need a whole teaspoon of Embryolisse Lait Crema, but it’s really easy to squeeze too much out of that metal tube. Depotting it into a more metered container can help with that!

	Airless Bottle and Pump, White with Overcap, Clear These are great for moisturizers, serums, face oils, primers, basically anything that is not a balm.  These airless bottles meter each pump so you don’t use too much!  #thrifty
See these airless bottles in action at milliefeuille.com!
	Cylinder Bottle, Natural with Dropper Tip Insert and Overcap, White Small dropper bottles like this are great for liquids that are 1) thin enough to get through the dropper and 2) that you don’t need more than 10 to 12 drops per face.  Facial oils, airbrush foundations, serums, and sealers are great things to depot into these little guys.
	Squeeze Bottle with Flip Top Cap  These bottles are great for depotting airbrush foundations or traditional liquid foundations that are thin enough to get through the dropper.  Be cautious of leakage, as some foundations can seep through the closure.  My advice is to try it on one color first and then, if that goes well, transfer them all!

So, let’s see how compact we can possibly get our kits!  A word of warning, though — carrying these smaller quantities means that you HAVE to evaluate your kit after every job to make sure you have enough of everything.  When you’re only carrying 1 ounce of micellar water, you’ll definitely run out faster than if you were carting the whole bottle around.  For pro artists, it’s worth it not to have the extra weight and bulk of carrying full size products. 

Stay tuned for our next installment that focuses on Cream Products and learn all the tips and tricks to taking your kit from 78lbs to maybe 20lbs!