The Story Behind My Makeup Collection

Today’s post is a guest post by one of my blog sponsors My Makeup Collection.  For those of you who love makeup as much as I do and have a rather large collection of makeup and beauty products, this is the app for you!  Rebecca has developed a method to organize your collection so that you know exactly what you own.  You can also use the app to share your products reviews.  This wonderful app is available for FREE on both iTunes and Google Play.  See the links below to get it for yourself.

I have a lot of beauty products. (I know, a surprising confession from someone who has developed an app to organise her product swatches!) I realised when I started a small blog that my makeup tracking spreadsheet was not really doing everything I needed it do; for one thing it was hard to read when I was in a store trying to see what I already owned and for another it was hard to match up swatches with any details about products. For that reason I tended to just keep buying similar products when I was wandering through the store with $20 to buy a quick beauty pick-me-up. Not only were the products sometimes dupe of other products but I also came home a few times with an item which I already owned. And my husband would sometimes buy me an item I had been lusting over for months… only to discover I had bought it for myself a few weeks before.

I don’t have a background in software development but I do know about organising data. This seemed like a perfect time to use a database rather than a spreadsheet. I sketched out an idea of what I really wanted in a makeup database;
– accessible from my phone,
– customisable to enter different product types and brands (because I always seem to find new indies I must buy!),
– ability to record which items I used in makeup looks or nail art (so if I’m trying to replicate it later, or describe it to someone, I can use the same product names)
– data stored in the cloud so I don’t have to replicate the data entry if I lose my phone (or the kids dunk it in a bucket of water!),
– an overview to see how much of each kind of makeup and which brands I own (I now know that I seem to buy many more mascaras than I can ever use.)
– ability to share reviews from my phone on Facebook and email, a related wish list function so I can prioritise the items I do want to buy and not keep buying to same items!)

Looking around there weren’t any products that had all these features as many of the apps were written from the point of view of brands trying to provide information to me, rather than from the point of view of user. With that in mind My Makeup Collection was started. We have an app on iTunes and the Google Play store and are continually working to improve the app. Our community of users is growing rapidly and is giving us feedback to ensure the app keeps being developed in a way to improve it’s usefulness to makeup artists and bloggers.

You can come visit us on Facebook or Twitter, and the app is available for free on iTunes and Google Play.