Travel Size Me

I haven’t flown since my New York trip back in 2010…and I checked my bag so I didn’t need to worry about traveling with toiletries.  But for our upcoming Vegas trip, we don’t plan to check any luggage, we’re sticking with carry-on only!  That adds a little stress, because how am I getting all my toiletries on the airplane?  We’re talkin’ VEGAS- fancy hair, lots of moisturizer, make-up and sunscreen!

The TSA 3-1-1 rule isn’t any fun:

3- All liquids must be in 3oz containers or less
1- All of your containers must fit in 1 quart-size ziplock bag
1- only one bag allowed per passenger

Liquids means anything not solid….obviously.  For me this includes: shampoo, conditioner, hair styling products, toothpaste, lipgloss, liquid foundation, sunscreen, mascara or liquid eyeliner, face serums & lotions, hand lotion, deodorant (gel deodorant)…

Yep, that all has to fit in ONE ziplock baggie in containers no larger than 3 oz.

Toothpaste- easy fix…the tiny tubes you get from the dentist!
Make-up- most of that comes appropriately sized
Facial care- I actually have the travel size (0.5 oz) containers of all my Arbonne products!
Sunscreen- ugh.  I love the spray sunscreens, guess I’ll have to do travel tubes of cream.
Hair products- I’m not too picky about my shampoo, but I am about my conditioner and other hair products.

I found my favorite conditioner in a travel/trial size, but the rest of my products I’m very particular and unfortunately they don’t come in tiny sizes.

I decided to start looking for empty travel-size spritzer bottles, and all the ones I found were too big (they were 3 oz size, but really I only need 1 oz), or too expensive, or I wanted three of them and they only had two, etc.

And then brilliance hit me!  Find the cheapest travel/trial size product out there in a spritzer bottle- dump the contents- and reuse the bottle!  Ta-da!

So today I did just that….bought three tiny 1 oz bottles of Pantene Hair Spray:

I emptied the contents, washed the bottles out, peeled the labels off:

Then refilled them with my favorite products.  Except that my alter ego Betty Ray Stewart likes everything to be organized and perfectly displayed….so that meant no handwriting labels. You’d think a label-maker would suffice, but no.  Because the bottles were a little tacky where the original label once was, so I’d have to wrap them.  So BRS found some clipart and printed out teeny tiny labels for each bottle and wrapped each bottle with clear packaging tape for water-proofness.

Simply fabulous!

(It really sucks being so particular sometimes)

So here it is… my quart-size travel bag of liquids: