Lessons from my diet

With regards to my makeup diet of 2012, overall I am very satisfied with my progress at working through my beauty stash.  Somehow it helps to collect the items and show it off - it's a way to make my goal tangible and so helps me stick to it.  A few things I've learned about my addiction through this self-inflicted challenge:

1. It takes me forever + an aeon to finish a product, even if that product is a teensy eensy sample. Unless I can eat it, it will take a long time to die.  
2. Quality over quantity, any day, any time.  Just because a product is cheap doesn't mean I need to snag it, and just because a product is expensive does not mean it will do miracles for me.  Using up an item for the sake of using it up wasn't very enjoyable.  Sure I got satisfaction from emptying a container and tossing it into my empties box, but the act of using up a dud is very tiresome!  In the end, I want to have fewer products that I love using rather than endless duds that I have to work to get through.
3. I don't need multiples of any product.  Not only does it take me a long time to work through an item, I find myself getting sick of using the same thing over and over again, especially when newer and better things are always looming in the market.  
4. "Limited Edition" is really a gimmick to make consumers feel the need to buy the item before it's gone.  Nothing is really "Limited Edition" because newer products are always on the horizon to dupe said limited edition product or even enhance it.  I mustn't get suckered into "Limited Edition" labels.
5. Holding on to products for the sake of having them is useless and a step towards Hoarders.  Why hold on to stuff I know I won't use?!  It's gotten easier to get throw away expired products, but I still need to work on paring down items that I don't enjoy using and those that are just poor quality.  
6. It feels good to let go of items that I can't throw away or use up by giving it to other people.  In addition to my diet, I've also gone through my stash and given away products that I had accumulated and never used.   All these items went into a bag which I left in my student lounge for my fellow classmates; the bag was empty within a day.  I also did this with a lot of clothing and house belongings that I no longer use/need.  This purge, if nothing else, has taught me to let go of things that I don't use so that those things might be used and enjoyed by somebody else.
7. Putting effort into how I present myself to the world is not vain.  I love makeup and all things beauty related, and it's okay to spend 5 minutes in the morning enhancing my features.  After all, why have so much makeup if I don't use it and don't enjoy using it?!

The purge of 2012 has allowed me to shed the bulk of the unnecessary baggage that I was holding on to.  For the future, I expect slower progress as I work through my products, i.e. slower accumulations of empties.  I do want to continue to record those because the strange high I get at seeing an emptied product helps me stay focused.   I don't want to put myself on a strict no-buy like I did for the first diet attempt because at this stage of the diet, the focus is on maintenance.  So as long as I don't gorge myself to the state of my collection at the beginning of 2012, I think it would be okay to treat myself to something I lusted over.