I trade off between spending the week down in the South Bay and my weekends up in San Francisco. Though I’ve done this so frequently, I always end up forgetting to pack something in my weekender and this weekend that “thing” happened to be my entire beauty bag! We had plans to go out that night and while I wish I could say I am comfortable enough with myself to go completely make-up free, that wasn’t the case. I managed to find a moisturizing lotion where I was staying so I had the base covered, but the next thing I needed to do was prioritize. I asked myself two questions: What did I absolutely need to have and where can I get it?

I’m not someone who is big on makeup and knowing everything, but I think I can get by on the basics that my mama taught me. On the priority scale, I decided that I needed black eyeliner, eye makeup remover (if I could get it – to take off the previous night’s work,) mascara, and a foundation.

First stop? Sephora. You might be wondering why I didn’t choose to go to a drug store first and I wondered about this myself, too. Too often, I find myself actually using products from Sephora rather than drugstore brands and while these were just going to be “back-up buys,” you never know when you’re gonna find something that you can either a) end up using for a longer amount of time or b) replace something you already have that maybe needed to be replaced.

Sephora is a store that gets abused by their customers. Too often, people come into the store that don’t want to buy their own makeup and test products all day long until they’ve done their entire look for the night or had someone else do that for them. Using samples at Sephora to do your makeup is kind of gross because as sanitary as they try to make it, that doesn’t usually happen. Gross. I went into the store with a fresh face and only moisturizer and I knew I might speak to some consultants, but I wasn’t going to take advantage of them by not buying anything. The first place I headed to was near the cash register where they have a lot of their basic products in much smaller sizes. The price ranges from about $8-$15. Here is where I picked up a duo combo of eyeliner and eye makeup remover as well as my Tarte mascara.

I’d been wanting to replace my foundation for quite some time as I have been using my Chanel for at least a year. (Should probably throw that out by now, right?) I’ve always been interested in using Benefit’s Hello Flawless Oxygen Wow and this was the perfect opportunity. A consultant matched it with my skin tone. I asked if he could try it on my entire face so that I could see it and I walked away with that purchase at around $36. Altogether from the day I spent about $50 on four things.

Long story short, if you’re ever caught in a bind like this – pick the items that you need and head to your nearest Sephora 🙂 It sounds like they asked me to say that, but I promise they didn’t.

Note: I didn’t love the eyeliner and the makeup remover because it was too greasy so we didn’t include it in the photo.