Against the backdrop of the bloated beauty industry’s constant push to buy what’s new, panners have made a movement that’s all about using what they have.
Meet the Beauty Community That Just Wants You to Finish Your Makeup
When Tara* was in college, makeup was her biggest hobby. She was shopping for it all the time. New makeup arrived in the mail every single day. She’d even factored her makeup spending into her student loan applications. At the height of her collection, she estimated that she had $3,000 to $5,000 worth of makeup.
She shopped so much that sometimes, packages would arrive and sit on her desk for days before she would get to them. That was when she first realized she might have a problem. “That's not great if you're getting so excited about something that you have to buy it within an hour, and then you just, like, let it sit in the package,” Tara says.
She graduated college in 2018, and for the first few months of post-grad life, she had no income. She started to sell some of her makeup, wanting a more practical collection. She had been watching videos about minimalist lifestyles, about different kinds of consumption. And she remembers looking at her Anastasia Beverly Hills Modern Renaissance palette—the first real palette she’d ever bought, “and just being like, I want to try to use that up.”
Two years later, in November 2020, Tara finished her project. She posted the photo of the empty palette on Reddit: the velvet packaging now held 12 empty metal pans. In the process, she’d repurposed certain shades into brow gels, others into cheek products. She decluttered all her other palettes, downsized her collection, and completely changed her relationship to makeup.
Tara is part of a growing community of makeup enthusiasts—on Reddit, on Instagram, on Facebook groups, and Youtube—who are rethinking their approach to makeup and consumption. Makeup panners celebrate used makeup—the more used, the better. They thrill over the first sighting of a crack in the metal pan of an eyeshadow or blush—a “baby pan” (“the best feeling in the world,” Tara says), and document their progress in periodic updates towards a “true pan”—a completely empty product. They photograph skin care or hair care “empties,” and often track their spending through what they’ve used. Instead of celebrating makeup hauls and constant new releases, the panners want to use what they have—and take a more mindful approach to consumerism.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Laura Yan,Fujio Emura
