It's Not About the Goo: A Memoir of Cosmetics Obsession and My Discovered Identity

By Angela Willows

Can that mountain of cosmetics give you clues to your self-esteem and identity? Yes, indeed!


ITS NOT ABOUT THE GOO explores the reasons why women collect cosmetic Goo.
Angela wondered why she had so many cosmetics. Surely she didnt need so much. It wasnt logical. Why not clean it up? It sounded so simple until she realized that she couldnt let it go. The mountain of dirty old cosmetics turned out to be part of the story of Angela. After seeing the link between her reluctance to throw away old cosmetics and her self-worth, she set about to change how she felt about herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496976413

Angela Willows

Angela Willows is a self-confessed cosmetics junky and “Goo Whisperer”. As the owner of a ‘Texas-sized’ cosmetic bag, she has been wearing cosmetics since she was 10 years old. A Canadian accountant, she lives and works in Switzerland.

Book preview

The 12 Steps of Goo

Inspired by my husband’s Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step Program, I created my own 12 Steps of Goo. I didn’t set out to use the 12 Steps to work on the Goo Project. It was my husband, Ewan* who recognized that through my de-gooing journey that I had actually followed the traditional 12 steps very closely. The structure of the AA program has been successfully adapted for many other addictions. It seemed only logical to create my own 12 steps for the goo.

Step 1:   I admitted that I was powerless over goo and my life had become unmanageable

Step 2:    Came to believe that by getting rid of my goo, I could be restored to sanity

Step 3:    Made a decision to turn my goo over to the care of another person—the garbage man

Step 4:    Made a searching and fearless inventory of my goo

Step 5:    Admitted to cosmeticians, myself, and another human being why I hoarded goo

Step 6:    Was entirely ready to have all my defective goo removed

Step 7:    Humbly asked if anyone wanted the goo

Step 8:    Make a list of my goo and became willing to use what I could

Step 9:    Make direct amends to the goo except when to do so would lead to a rash

Step 10:    Continued to take goo inventory and when it was bad, defective, or the wrong color, threw it out.

Step 11:    Sought through prayer and meditation to improve my goo purchases, praying for good decisions in the choice of colors

Step 12:    Having realized I was a goo hoarder, I wrote a book to pass along the message to other suffering goo hoarders and to practice good goo usage in all my affairs.

THE SIMPLE PROJECT

The Goo Hoarding Project

Everything we own is part of the story of who we are. Our identity is supported by a collection of objects. Look at what you own. Why do you have it? Maybe you have never really thought about it until you realised that your collection of stuff looks nothing like that of other people. Usually we realise that we have a lot of one item after visiting someone. How many times have you left a friend’s house and commented on how many DVDs or photographs they had? These objects tell a story about who we think we are. Even the stuff we don’t have is part of our story. All those items—sometimes useless and unnecessary—are really just a pile of what I call ‘goo’.

The funny thing is that even if we don’t have a practical use for the objects, we hang onto it all as though it was incredibly valuable and precious to us. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that we have difficulty letting go of our ‘identity objects’. That was what I was doing… hanging on to stuff that I didn’t need. This is the story of how I let go of my ‘goo’. More than that I understood myself better and came to terms with the person staring back in the mirror.

Everyone has a collection of ‘goo’. It doesn’t really matter what we are collecting. As I found by looking at my own ‘goo’ and that of other people, the ‘goo’ comes in a variety of forms. Some people are collecting cosmetics or hoarding medical supplies or even pictures of cats on their phone. Somehow all this stuff is a milepost in our life that tells we are okay. Surrounding ourselves with the ‘identity stuff’ is a way for us to feel ‘normal’. When these things are missing, we feel uncomfortable, as if things aren’t right. All of it is based in the complicated picture of who we think we are.

For most of my life, I’ve believed that cosmetics were a fundamental part of my womanhood. I literally never left the house without makeup on. That was part of who I thought that I was. It was the story of me—I wear makeup every day. Never did I question this. Why would I? Cosmetics are easily accessible. Almost every woman wears them. Moreover, we live in a society that encourages women to enhance our beauty with a variety of things, cosmetics being the most normal and socially acceptable. For me, make-up was a normal part of my daily existence.

This didn’t start out as a project to better understand myself better. In fact, it all began when I couldn’t figure out why I was doing something totally irrational. What I did discover was that my goo hoarding tendencies came from the idea of who I was and the way I viewed myself. This opinion wasn’t always positive… . nor was it really true. This thinking flew in the face of all the evidence that I could see and yet I struggled to change it. But change it, I did.

My life-long passion for cosmetics had evolved into something strange. I struggled to throw away things which were clearly garbage. But why? What started out as a ‘brilliant’ idea to clean up a mess, ended up being a self-esteem project. Who knew that a pile of unused cosmetics would be so strongly linked to my irrational fears and self-worth? I realized through my journey to de-clutter my goo, that I didn’t have a problem with goo, I had a problem with me. It became a journey from a goo hoarder, filled with fear and doubts to understanding how to accept myself.

Understanding my self-perception started out much more innocently. In fact, the idea came out of a You Tube video. During my Christmas break, I came across a weekly blog spot from an Italian-American girl who was absolutely hilarious: Jenna Marbles. She talked about how frustrated her boyfriend was with her ‘Goo Hoarding’. He comically said, What is it with all you women and the goo hoarding? She took out 20 tubes of lip gloss and said that she couldn’t really understand her compulsion to buy lip-gloss in every shade, knowing full well that she had more than she would ever use. Those little tubes were tucked in every place in her life—her purse, her car, her desk, her kitchen. Even when she was buying more, she knew that she would never use it. But it didn’t stop there. She had other ‘goo’. Half-empty shampoo bottles stacked up in the shower. Hairspray with just a little bit left tossed in a drawer. Hand creams on a shelf. Old nail polish that she just can’t bring herself to chuck out.

After watching the spot, a thought went through my head. Maybe I should un-hoard my goo. Such a simple thing meant that I didn’t need to tell anyone else about it. It was like telling people that I was going to wear green shirts more often. No one would care. Not too much hard work would be required and it was going to be simple and fast to take care of it. Plus, it’s pretty silly to be holding onto a bunch of ‘stuff’. The goo hoarding didn’t seem as difficult to tackle as the garage or the junk drawer for that matter. It was really no big deal. I wasn’t going to need to have a garage sale to get rid of it. There would be no need to involve my family or neighbors. Good Will wasn’t going to come with a truck. I certainly wouldn’t need a dumpster set up on the driveway. In short, I could keep this topic a dirty little secret. It was a small shameful problem and one black plastic bag should more than handle the problem.

For a long time, I only told my husband about the idea. He was non-committedly supportive and frankly, seemed quite relived that the piles of bottles in the shower were suddenly going to disappear. Being the supportive spouse that he is, he endorsed the project. Moving ahead was clearly a no-brainer.

New Year’s Resolutions are a fickle animal. We all decide to get thinner, save more money, spend more time with family, or whatever else you felt guilty about after spending Christmas with your family. New Year’s Resolutions are more synonymous with not keeping them then with actually making any real change in your life. Usually, I am not one for making them. In spite of my cynical view on New Year’s resolutions, I made a simple one. No more Goo Hoarding. The solution was deceptively simple and there was minimal chance of becoming a tired cliché. It was going to be easy to keep this New Year’s resolution.

This was a brilliant idea. I could perform so many good deeds with one simple resolution. Not only would I use up things that I had paid a lot of money for, but I would also be recycling some bottles back to the global supply chain. Better money usage, recycling, and de-cluttering, were all going to be a much more impactful change than the traditional New Year’s Resolution of trying to lose weight. The longer I considered this idea, the more I believed that I was totally on the right track.

The project’s simplicity meant that some elaborate strategy to handle it was totally unnecessary. The theory was simple: I’ll just use up those partial bottles until they were all done, toss them out, and ta-dah! Goo be gone. Deep thinking was not required. In retrospect, the idea had a critical flaw which led the project down a very different path than I had intended. The resolve was to use everything before it was thrown out. That last squeeze out of the tube was finally going to get squeezed. By doing this, I was forced to deal with the reasons why I bought, used, and kept everything which was far beyond the idea of getting rid of the goo. This was not a deliberate choice but rather it eventually became part of my own story. What does it say about me if I threw out something perfectly good and usable? A question I eventually was able to answer.

To kick off my new-found resolve, I started with the most obvious thing I could see when I got up the next morning: shampoo and conditioner. I had two bottles of shampoo in the shower and two bottles of conditioner, in two brands. So I took the fuller bottles out of the shower and put them in the ‘product closet’ and made a pact with myself to use up the older products. Good idea and simple too.

Okay, I quickly remembered why I switched to the new stuff. It’s amazing how easily I forgot why I stopped using this product. Styling my hair became quite difficult with this stuff. The old shampoo and conditioner smelled funny, had a weird consistency, and made my hair sort of sticky. As a woman with naturally curly hair, I am prone to frizz. If a woman like me wants to have a good hair day, the right products are seriously important. These products were even worse than I remembered. Frizz was just one of the problems these products were promoting. Still, I was disciplined and was sticking to my guns. A normal person may have simply thrown out the offending product. Without even realising it, the New Year’s Resolution criteria required me to use all the products rather than just throw them out when I rediscovered why I stopped using them. My resolve was clear—use the products up. This wasn’t going to be just another broken New Year’s resolution that collapsed after the first hurdle.

Every morning, I angrily rubbed that crap in my hair. Then I fought with a hair dryer and flat iron in an attempt to get my hair looking somewhat decent to face the world. Luckily, the bottles didn’t last too long. I finished that set and vowed to never again buy that brand. The empty pieces were placed in the recycling bin with great satisfaction. In fact, I think I happily slam-dunked those bottles into the bin. It felt good. Then I got the new set back out and was back to good hair days and easy styling.

Whew… that was painful but I did it.

A normal person would have realised that it was a bad idea to use up old products before tossing them out. The project scope should gone back to just throwing them away or recycling them. Having been reminded why I stopped using the offending shampoo, I should have been able to predict that the remaining lot would produce a similar outcome. But I didn’t make this leap and I kept going on the same path. In fact, I felt that the first goo resolution exercise had been a complete success.

With this glow of success under my belt, it was time to attack the next round of goo. Where would I start? Now I really love cosmetics. Let’s just say that I accept that there are women who only put mascara on and that is enough for them. I don’t get it but I accept it. I love lipstick and eye shadow and I love putting them on. I am a firm believer that all the products are needed—concealer, eyebrow pencils, foundation, press powder, bronzer, blusher, cream eye shadow, powder eye shadow, lip liner, eye liner, lip stick, and of course, mascara. I don’t like lip-gloss. There I said it.

My enthusiasm isn’t limited to cosmetics—age-fighter and skin care products are also wonderful. I firmly believe that women are perfectly justified in fighting the seven signs of aging with whatever weapon they can buy. Having successfully tried many of these products, I am a faithful devotee of several which I credit for the nice condition of my skin. Cosmetic surgery scares me but certainly any miracle in a bottle you might hear about is worth a try.

Now for a long, long time, I didn’t know that most women don’t generally feel this way about their cosmetics. We have this tendency to believe that everyone feels the same way that we do. I guess that I never really thought about it. I just thought that women who went out in public without make-up probably weren’t raised right by their mothers. If they knew better, they would do better, right? This seems a little comical now. Having spent time with women talking openly about their cosmetic collections, it’s quite apparent that many women don’t actually use so many products. These women are good people and actually quite attractive without much effort at all. My previous judgmental assessment of their poor childhood turns out to be totally incorrect.

It’s time to admit the obvious here. Anyone with such a passion is going to have an un-necessarily large collection of products, both opened and unopened. It seems so clear now but I really wasn’t in touch with the reality about the size of my ‘collection’. A sharp learning curve was ahead. It was going to take a little longer than I originally thought to conclude this project. I was firmly convinced that I just needed to use ‘em up. That seemed like a great idea, but I had vastly underestimated the amount of time it was going to take to use all that stuff.

Goo Hoarding is just funny term for a couple of partially used bottles rattling around a drawer, right? Just watch these de-cluttering shows and you see how much it helps to clean stuff up. Once I had made the decision to un-hoard the goo, it seemed like the most brilliant idea in the world. But this simple project was going to be anything but simple… but I think you already knew that, didn’t you?

On Hoarding and De-Cluttering

It’s funny how I really connected with this idea of goo hoarding. I completely understood this concept. Not only does it have a great name, but it spoke to my own habit and secret stash of products lurking in several areas of my home. The goo hoarding was a small-scale version of the big problem that several television networks had picked up on. Like most of us, I spent many of my TV-watching hours in front of learning channels enraptured with Hoarders and those de-cluttering shows. I think we all do this.

What is it about Hoarders in particular? We see bit of ourselves in these people. They have this totally illogical urge to hold onto stuff with absolutely no purpose. They have held onto so much ‘stuff’ that it interferes with their ability to enjoy life. The scope and scale of their hoarding is so extreme, that you feel better about your inability to clear up a single closet or a drawer which bears a striking resemblance to the houses of people profiled on Hoarders. It may not be PC but we all feel better about our own small-scale hoarding because our issue remains on a small-scale, irritating our husbands but involving no real likelihood that the health board will come to condemn our closets.

De-clutter shows seem to have a different effect. When you watch Hoarders, you get this overwhelming urge to clean stuff up. The de-cluttering shows give you the feeling that something is getting cleaned up, resolved, and you don’t have to leave your comfy chair to witness a cleaning miracle. The de-cluttering premise is simple. They clear out a spare room that has gotten out of hand and turn it into a beautiful dream-room. The room is magically transformed into a fantasy office or sewing room. You have always dreamed that you could have the same thing happen at your house if you could just find a place for eight empty suitcases, the second vacuum cleaner, the rocking chair from when your son was a baby, your dear-departed dog’s ashes, a bobble headed figure that your husband gave you on your first date, your collections of records from your teenage years, an ill-conceived, expensive, and incomplete hobby, and more clothes that anyone could wear even if they changed outfits every day for one year and never wore a single thing twice.

But that is the dream, isn’t it? If I could only let go of the ‘stuff’ I would be able to have a dream. It clears you up, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Yet we resist making the change. The rationalizations that stop us are numerous. I didn’t want to clean up a big mess and start making the ‘Sophie’s Choice’ on my crap. Plus, what if I got rid of it and then actually needed it in a few months. We don’t talk about that room, do we? Even though I could intellectually understand that I could live without that pile of stuff, I dreaded the idea of getting rid of it. For some reason, I didn’t want to face the possibility. There was so much emotional energy in that room. So instead of doing it, I’d watch it happen on TV on Saturday morning.

The de-cluttering shows usually focus around a single room that needs a clean-up. If we don’t have that room, how do we recognize when it’s scattered all over the house?

Occasionally we de-clutter our things and are happy that we did it. Getting rid of the clutter really does help our emotional energy. I don’t know how this works but as soon as I clear out a closet I suddenly feel lighter, happier, and clearer. It seems to be good for us to get rid of excess ‘stuff’. For some reason, it simply had never occurred to me that I should de-clutter the goo. I am always up for some emotional energy clean-up. It could be good for me.

Meditations on Martha

To be honest, this New Year Resolution project wasn’t the first time that I recognized that I had a cluttered collection of partially used products. Many years prior to all my goo de-cluttering, I was aware that the collection did resemble a mess. By that I mean a shameful secret and a disgusting pile of clutter. I had not yet reached a place where I wanted to get rid of the collection, but I did feel that perhaps that a clean-up was in order (not a clear-out). Since there was no reason to get rid of perfectly good cosmetics, I would need to put them into perfect order so that I would be able to clearly see them, remember them, and possibly (but not certainly) use them.

Who was my inspiration for this task? Martha Stewart, of course. Being the perfectionist (read: mentally insane person) that I am, I needed to aspire to the gold standard for organization. Martha Stewart has inspired women from North America to revert back to the traditional role of female household aficionado. Clearly this is a lost art that women long to recapture. Martha has become synonymous with the ironing and perfect folding of that silly bottom sheet. She encourages women to become the perfect hostess who has it all together, remembering to add those little touches that make everything perfect. You know, like a Stepford Wife.

Whenever a woman hosts the perfect dinner party, we facetiously call her Martha. Such perfect presentation feels like a throwback to that idealistic life we dreamed we might have when we were 10-year-old girls. Just like the ‘real’ women of Stepford, we suspect that it isn’t natural to have a perfect home and be a perfect woman. Meanwhile in the real world, we soon realize that it just isn’t possible to spend that much time creating a magazine layout picture in our house. Besides no one can actually live in those houses. Five minutes after your children get home, the house looks like the ‘before’ picture. Or in my case, five minutes after I arrive home, my shoes, purse, laptop, paperwork, dishes, and sunglasses start to clutter things up. Just to prove my point, I’m actually looking at a Happy Birthday banner and it’s been nearly a month since the last birthday here. Sure I should put it away, but it just isn’t that important to me. Secretly, when we observe those Martha moments being played out by another woman, a little part of us resents her. The reality is that her standards makes us feel bad about ourselves. For some reason we still allow ourselves to be judged as good or bad based upon having that picture-perfect dinner party image rather than on the quality of our character. Often we resent the pressure to be a better wife, mother, and woman. For some, Martha represents a standard which we worry that we can never attain. The conclusion: if we aren’t perfect wives, mothers, and hostesses, we are flawed and failing as women.

Whatever the reason we berate ourselves, it still means that we cannot have any guests in our