Dishing the dirt: you won’t believe the bacteria found inside our makeup bags

This is really gross.

Ok, be honest, how often are you washing your make up utensils? If you are cleaning your brushes and other make up bits regularly you can stop reading now, but if like most of us you're a little bit cheeky when it comes to letting your make up bag hygiene slide, you might want to read this. According to a recent survey, approximately 12 per cent of us never clean our makeup bags and that's just the ones who fessed up. Some makeup utensils were more neglected than others with tweezers and pencil sharpeners being cleaned the least with over 17 per cent of those surveyed addmitting to never washing them. On the other hand the most washed products were face cloths and towels. Makeup brushes and brushes fell in the middle with between four to five per cent of participants never washing them.   Skin experts recommend that makeup brushes are a brush sanitised after every use and that makeup sponges are replaced every four to six months to prevent the build up of bacteria. They also say that we should be ditching any makeup products that have passed their recommended use by date. For eyeshadow that's around one year after you first open it all the way down to concealer which we should only keep for six months after we first open it. Again, this is to prevent any bacteria that might be growing on the makeup from getting onto our skin and especially our eye area. You can see some results of testing out dirty brushes here as well as more information on when we should be binning our makeup products. It may be tough to say goodbye to some products but your skin will thank you for it in the long run.