How to Recycle your Touche Eclat

You made it.  After sprinting for the last five minutes you've managed to just wedge your foot in the train door in time.  With one swift push, you're in!  Phew!  You wipe your brow and search around to check that everybody didn't just see you launch your glamorous self into their cabin.  You straighten yourself up, flash an embarrassed smile and slink into the nearest seat.  The only thing you didn't have time to do this morning was apply your lipstick.  Rifling through your bag, out comes your chosen colour.  Now where is that lip brush?  A sensible woman would put all these kinds of beautifying ingredients into a make-up bag.  You remind yourself that you are not sensible.  You shirk off your own criticism and continue to rummage.  First hands, then arms disappear.  Soon your entire head is in your Marc Jacobs and your beginning to emulate a scene from Mary Poppins.  Pens, mints, antibacterial hand gel and other random but very useful belongings are strewn out of the bag.  You huff, you puff, you fall back into your seat, exhausted.  You could just apply the lipstick like a normal person but what would be the point of purchasing a lip brush in the first place?  Plus you can administer far better control of that hot pink colour with the brush, so as not to scare your colleagues.  No.  You will not be beaten.  You dive back in.

Is this anybody else?  I bought a lip brush, and it is so teeny tiny, I'm looking for it far more than I am ever using it!  Then I had, what I consider a pretty cool idea.  An idea that not only saves you this arduous start to your day but is also credit busting, which seems to be a regular phrase on To Elle and Back.  I tend to keep a lot of empty products, mostly to use as travel sizes for when I'm on holiday, you can see how I do that in The Smart Girl's Guide to Travelling Light.  I had, however, accumulated three finished YSL Touche  Eclat's, for a reason far beyond my knowledge but that's beside the point.  On yet another occasion when my trusty lip brush was playing hide and seek, I realised that when cleaned properly the brush from the Touche Eclat could essentially do the same thing.  So I did just that.  I used my antibacterial brush cleaner on the Touche Eclat brush and have been using it as my lip brush ever since.  It's bigger than my original and even when buried in the deep depths of your, read my, Mary Poppin's bag you're guaranteed to see the shiny gold packaging peering out beneath your random but very useful belongings!

Have you got any DIY treatments, products etc that work just as well as those you purchase?