The Use-It-Up Lip Plan

Finish the lip products you open: date the drawer, count your wears, measure what a tube gives, and open only as many lipsticks, glosses and balms as you can finish before their dates

LipEnvy's Expiry Date Tracker dates one lipstick, gloss or balm at a time from its maker's open-jar number. Its Color Match Tool answers with three lipstick shades at once, and its Beauty Budget Planner splits money by percent. None of them adds up the wears a week across everything open in a drawer, so nothing says how many lip products one person can finish before their dates. The Use-It-Up Lip Plan works it through. In its worked example, lipstick worn 5 days a week, with tubes measured at 220 wears and a 12M open-jar number, gets 260 wears before the date: one open tube is finished on day 308. Open the Color Match Tool's three shades together and each reaches its date 39% used, with $43.86 left in the tubes, and a wear costs $0.28 instead of $0.11. The plan dates the drawer, counts your wears by kind, measures what a tube gives with a ruler, sets an open count for each kind, wears the soonest date first, keeps new shades on a list until one is done, and writes the lip line your budget never had: $149.98 a year in the example, $106.42 at the open counts. Every figure is computed by the site's own Expiry Date Tracker, Color Match Tool and Beauty Budget Planner; the prices, wear counts and open-jar numbers are examples for you to replace. It names no maker, makes no claim about what a product does for lips or skin, and does not cover sun protection. Included: 24 printable pages with seven steps, four working pages, open-count tables and a quickstart, plus a personalised sheet worked on your own shades, open-jar number and budget.

Look inside

Two full pages from the plan, exactly as printed. Click either to read it at full size before you decide.

What is in it

• Step 1: every open lip product dated from its maker's open-jar number or printed date, never a guess
• Step 2: two weeks of wears counted by kind: lipstick, gloss, balm and liner
• Step 3: the wears one product gives, measured with a ruler on a lipstick bullet or counted from the last one you finished
• Step 4: each kind's finish line and open count: how many can be open and all be finished before their dates
• Step 5: earliest date first: the soonest-dated product gets the wears until it is done or its date comes
• Step 6: one in, one done: new shades wait on a list, with the yearly price of each extra open tube
• Step 7: the lip line your budget never had, counted from the bottom up
• Four working pages: a drawer sheet, a wear count with a ruler log, a finish-line sheet and a one-in sheet
• Open-count tables for 12M and 24M open-jar numbers, and a quickstart that closes the score loop
• A personalised sheet: your Color Match shades as a one-at-a-time list, your open-jar number as an open count, and where a Lips line sits in your budget

The plan picks up where the free Expiry Date Trackerleaves off. The tracker dates one lipstick, gloss or balm at a time from its maker’s open-jar number; the Color Match Tool answers with three lipstick shades at once; the Beauty Budget Planner splits money by percent. The plan adds them up: every open product dated, your wears counted by kind, the wears one tube gives measured with a ruler, and the number of each kind you can have open and still finish before their dates. Then it wears the soonest date first, keeps new shades on a list until one is done, and writes the lip line your budget never had. It names no maker, makes no claim about what a product does for lips or skin, and does not cover sun protection. Every figure in it is an example for you to replace.