making my own cotton rounds

I have made some major life and outlook changes in my life the past few months and many of these are surrounding the waste that I produce and how much of the world’s resources that I use on a daily basis.

This change came from a lot of things but in many ways, it came out of my goal to switch all of my makeup, skincare, and haircare routines to be cruelty free. While I am still in the middle of this journey (as I am replacing the products as I run out of others), I wanted to do something more in the bathroom. Next week I will be talking more about my current skincare routine and how I removed makeup wipes from my bathroom so make sure to look out for that post if you are interested!

One of my major forms of waste in the bathroom with my skincare was cotton rounds. On days that I wore makeup I would use probably three every single day and that really adds up, both in cost and in my bathroom garbage can.

I have seen a few posts on Pinterest and videos on YouTube of people who made their own cotton rounds that can be washed in the laundry and decided that I could do that.

For fabric I decided to use an old plaid cotton shirt that had gotten too big for my husband that was a darker colour so it wouldn’t get stained and that we were just planning on donating to the thrift store. If you don’t have any fabric lying around that you can use for this, you can buy some cheap fabric from the thrift store or ask friends and family if they have any fabric that you can use.

Next I decided that I wanted my cotton rounds to be two layers thick, but you can change that up depending on how soft and thick the fabric is, though I would suggest at least two so that they are soft on your face and don’t fall apart. I laid out the shirt and cut sections off to work with smaller areas of fabric. Taking a cotton round that I still had, I traced dozens of circles on the fabric with a sharpie, making sure to leave the fabric two layers thick in all of the sections.

Now is when my wonderful husband stepped in! He is much better with a sewing machine than I am and he sewed all of the circles together. It took a few tries to figure out the best size and type of stitch to use, but before you know it he was buzzing away and sewing like a mad man. As he finished each section he handing the fabric back to me and I cut out each of the circles and cleaned up all of the lose threads. Overall we made over 100 cotton rounds which means that I only have to wash them once a month and I won’t be running out anytime soon.

Before I used the cotton rounds, I put them in the wash (in a special delicates laundry bag) to clean them up and then put them away for when I finished up my regular cotton rounds. Finally a few weeks ago that day happened and I have started regularly using my homemade cotton rounds. So what do I think?

I LOVE THEM!

I can barely feel a difference from what I used before and my waste has gone down significantly. In what took less than a day to make and will take very little effort to clean I have made a major change to what I put in my trash can and feel like I have made an effort to be better for the environment.

There is only one thing that I have had issues with and that is nail polish remover. I found that the homemade cotton rounds weren’t as good at removing my nail polish, but I have some ideas on how to make them better including having a few soaking in the remover so that they are fully saturated. It could also be the type of fabric that I used.
If you have any other ideas let me know as I would love to hear about them.

This has been such a great experience to me, and I can’t wait to continue to find easy ways to reduce my waste and become more low-impact on this beautiful earth that I hope sticks around for a very long time.