So, hands up anyone who’s even remotely surprised to find that my new dressing table / makeup storage solution came from IKEA?

I’m going to go ahead and assume no one has their hands up right now. My love of Ikea makeup storage – and Ikea in general, actually – has been well documented, but what you might be surprised to hear is that I didn’t just rush straight to Ikea when I was looking for makeup storage ideas for the new bedroom. No, it took at least five minutes for me to pull up the Ikea website and start telling Terry we were long overdue a visit to the store. At least.

I’m joking, of course: I’ve been thinking about buying a dressing table since before we even bought the house, and I did actually shop around for one, but the fact is, I just kept on circling back to the IKEA MALM . I loved this table, not just because the clean, minimal shape is very much my taste, but because of that long, shallow drawer, which holds all the goodies:

(The transparent chair is from Tesco, of all places. The mirror was from eBay – you can find a similar one here.)

When it comes to makeup storage, I much prefer shallow containers of some description, which allow you to see everything at a glance, without having to rummage for ages to find that one lipstick you KNOW is in there somewhere, but which always seems to find its way to the bottom of the pile. That’s why I bought my acrylic Muji drawers last year: I still love them (and will be using them for jewellery, now that I don’t need them for makeup, so they won’t go to waste!), but Terry wasn’t so keen on the giant tower o’ makeup in the bathroom, and I loved the idea of having everything in one single drawer, so the decision was made, and the dressing table was finally delivered last week.

Ikea storage ideas

The dressing table organiser inside the drawer are also from Ikea (from the Billingen range: I did have the clear plastic inserts from the Godmorgon range, but I prefer these, as they just look neater to me. The table holds 6 of these comfortably.) and I managed to get all of my makeup into them, with a little bit of space (although not too much, as you can see) for future purchases. Although my makeup collection probably seems completely ridiculous to some people, I know it’s small in comparison to true makeup junkies – I don’t really have a lot of interest in collecting tons of colours, etc, so I mostly just buy the things I use all the time (and a ton of red lipsticks, obviously…), which made it easy enough to fit it all into the drawer. If you have a large amount of makeup, though, you might need some additional makeup storage! I did keep the Muji acrylic pot for my brushes, which sits on top of the vanity, but I could probably have found space for them in the drawer if I’d really wanted to.

One of the trickiest parts of the project was finding the right mirror. I’ve wanted a makeup vanity with lights since I was a little girl, but all of the ones we found were hideously expensive, and even Ikea’s ‘Hollywood lights’, which you can place round an existing mirror, would’ve taken the whole room over budget. Terry finally managed to track down this vanity mirror on eBay, though, and drove into Edinburgh with my dad last week to collect it. I absolutely love it, and after years of either perching on the edge of the bed, or standing in front of the bathroom mirror to apply my makeup, it feels like such a luxury to be able to sit down and not have to keep going back and forth to collect different items.

So, whaddya do when you love your new dressing table a little bit more than is entirely rational? Why, you get another one, of course! In my defence, it wasn’t actually my fault that we ended up with two ‘Malm’ dressing tables… the first one we ordered arrived with a tiny mark on the front of the drawer: it wasn’t a huge deal, but, well, you know, you order a brand new dressing table, you want it to be perfect, so we called up Ikea who said it was no problem, they’d send out a replacement drawer. Fast-forward to Wednesday morning, when there was a knock on the door (actually, before that there was a 7am phone-call to say they were on their way. I don’t feel I can complain TOO much about that given what happened next, though…), and there were a couple of Ikea delivery men… with a whole new dressing table. They didn’t want to take the first one back either, so it seems that rather than replacing the drawer (which was all we’d asked for), they just decided to send us a whole new table.

I, of course, got super-excited about this, and immediately started thinking about all the new makeup I’d “have” to buy to fill it, but Terry quickly put a stop to that by pointing out that I really don’t need two dressing tables, so unless we could find another use for it, we’d be passing it onto someone who DID need it. Well, we’ve given it some thought, and as we really like the simple shape, which doesn’t look terribly “dressing-table-y” without the vanity mirror, we think we’re probably going to use it as a console table in the living room. We’d actually planned to get one of those eventually too, so we figured it would be silly not to at least try it and see how it looks. Hey, I wonder if Terry would notice if I filled the drawer with makeup?

EDITED TO ADD: In the past few weeks I’ve been absolutely inundated with questions from people wanting the direct link to the eBay auction I bought my mirror from: mine was a private sale (i.e. it was someone who bought it for themselves, and then decided to sell it, so I’m afraid I’m not able to provide the link, and I don’t know the name of the brand, or where they bought it. Any further questions about the table itself should be directed to Ikea, who I’m sure will be happy to help.