The End Of The Six-Item Experiment: Overflow

So! Our Six-Item Experiment is over. Well, maybe it officially ended like 10 days ago, when we purchased items seven and eight, and then, terribly, wore them to what we believe may popularly be referred to as an Industry Function. We were bad Sixers, but we tried.

Here’s what we found. First, we recommend this to any/everyone, as it really does make you think about what you buy, why you buy it, and what you wear—always, always worthy things to consider. When we first heard about this project, we thought it seemed pretty in line with our existing thoughts on the subject of wardrobe overload, and we were right. We’ve gone away for eight weeks with a suitcase that can fit in an overhead compartment, so we’re definitely, for sure, used to wearing the same five or six things day in and day out for weeks.

What we wouldn’t have known from doing this on the road was this: It was crazy for us to, actually, not be doing this on the road, to be doing it at home, and to see up close the contrast between our filled-to-overflowing closet with the small clump of clothes we were wearing every day. You know what we mean? We have these six items. They fit on our one chair. Even if we’re sitting in it. Our closet, on the other hand, is so stuffed with clothes (and Scrabbles, and books, and scrapbooks, but we digress) that we can hardly close the door. When we’re traveling with a suitcase, we’re not reminded of how much we own that we never wear: that Anthropologie top that makes us look like a bird, the Marc by Marc Jacobs top we got at a thrift shop but never mended. This time we were, and it was shocking, or at least as shocking your closet can be.

The same is true for our product area, pictured above. We didn’t have the heart/energy to fully invest ourselves in organizing our closet, but we did tackle our equally overflowing beauty/product/medicine cabinet area, and the results, pictured above, were ridiculous. Four tubs of that Body Shop coconut Body Butter. Four different face primers. Three containers of the exact same foundation, also, weirdly, from the Body Shop. Things we’d forgotten we’d even bought, and about a half-million hotel toiletries we collected and promptly forgot about.

For us, the Six Item experiment hasn’t been about thrift: We have no choice around thriftiness, if we plan to remain a freelance writer. For us, it’s been about waste, and use. You know, we’re not going to say we wasted our money on the 90 million as-yet unused products we found in our bathroom tonight. But we will waste them if we never use them, and this goes for clothing as well: Hopefully, there is something to celebrate, and appreciate, in each item we buy. Too often, that is not the case: We are buying yet another pair of jeans, almost exactly like the previous ones, because we’re bored, or they’re on sale, or we’ve forgotten that buying things isn’t actually as fun as going to the gym. We remain pro buying, when we use, cherish, and love what we bought. That’s harder to accomplish, we think, than that looks, because it looks easy, and it’s not. But we are happy to have somewhere to start, and we’re going to use, cherish, and enjoy each one of those products if it’s the last thing we do. Which means we are going to be saturated with coconut body butter for the next 450 years. Delicious!