It's hard to throw make-up away once you know that it's expired. Sooner than we expect, three months has passed by and that awesome tube of mascara is no longer good. If you're like me, you just ignore the expiration date and keep using it — mostly to save money. 

Here's the thing though: using expired make-up can be really bad for you. Expired make-up is not only harder to apply, it can also cause skin damage and a wide range of infections. If you're thinking, 'well, what's the worst that could happen?', the answer is a lot of things.

Mascara/Liquid Eyeliner

Mascara typically lasts for 3 months, and eyeliner usually lasts up to 6 months. Once expired, you really want to throw these products away. Each time that you push that mascara wand into the mascara tube, bacteria from the air enters the tube. This can cause red eye, staph infections, and in the worst cases, permanent blindness. 

Foundation/Concealer/Cream Products

These products usually expire a year to a year and a half after you open them. You can tell when liquid skin products have gone bad because they become harder to spread and apply evenly. Cream products include cream eyeshadow, cream blush, and cream foundation.

It is debatably most important to make sure that you're replacing your skin products because you can have a range of reactions to them once expired. These reactions include redness, inflammation, rashes, blisters, and acne. This is due to bacteria build up from swapping germs from your make-up to your face each time you use it. Pretty gross, right?

Lip Products/Powder Products

Lipstick, lip liner, lip gloss, powder eyeshadow, face powder, bronzer, and blush all last one and a half to two years. To prevent acne and other forms of skin irritation, make sure that you aren't using powder products past the two year date.

You really want to keep an eye on your lip products because using them after they've expired is really unhealthy. You want to keep bacteria away from your mouth, especially since you can get cold sores, aka herpes. No one wants that. Literally no one. 

Uses for Expired Make-up

So what can you do with old make-up besides just throwing it away? You can use your mascara wand as a spoolie, you can make lip balm out of your old lipstick, and you can make nail polish out of your old eyeshadow. 

By recycling these products and transforming them into super cool homemade products, you're making sure that you're getting the most bang for your buck. Friends and family might even be interested in these new products and offer to pay you to make them — you never know. 

Next time you reach for that expired eyeshadow, just remember that there's a pretty good chance that you could get pink eye, and you could be making some bomb homemade nail polish instead. I think we can all agree that nail polish > pink eye.