Since the end of February my beauty stash has been gradually whittled down from the twenty-three crates that I had stowed in my filming-stroke-storage room to one solitary toiletries bag, containing mostly trial samples and travel versions of my favourite products. I am now nearly at the end of my enforced house-hopping (just waiting on a few more windows to go in and a working kitchen and then my Grand Designs project will be at least habitable!) and I have become quite adept at creating little “capsule collections” of beauty necessities – tiny bottles of face oil, mini tubes of eye cream and multipurpose potions and lotions that can be used for everything from cleansing to soothing patches of dry skin. (See Weleda’s Almond Oil.)

But some of the most space-saving products have been the ones in the photograph above: highly-potent and effective cosmetics and skin treats that can be added drop-by-drop to your usual beauty products to provide completely custom-made textures and finishes.

The first is Clarins’ Golden Glow Booster; a concentrated self-tanner that can be added to any body oil, serum or lotion and that gives the skin a gorgeous, very believable bronzing. It’s user-friendly – just add more drops for a more intense tan – and the bottle is so much smaller than even the teeniest of standard self-tan containers so it’s brilliant for taking on holiday. You can find it online here.

Then there’s the Odacité Wild Carrot concentrated serum – very pure, very effective. Very expensive, too – a whopping £45 for 5ml and for me, the jury’s still out on whether the price is justifiable. Yes, the carrot oil is impeccably sourced and I can imagine that the process is very labour intensive and so on, but crikey. You only need a couple of drops at a time, thankfully, and I like to add it in as a booster to my moisturiser – it does seem to really give a good glowy lift – but even at that rate of use it doesn’t last long! Is anyone familiar with this oil? Let me know your thoughts below. You can find Odacité online at Cult Beauty.

Lastly, the Custom Cover Drops from Cover FX – I’ve only just reviewed these, but I think that they are great, once you get used to the amounts needed for various finishes, and a real space-saver. I’m still experimenting with the different mixers (moisturiser, SPF, face serums) but I will try and get it down on video when I’m back into the swing of things. You can read my full review here.

Any more customisable beauty products that you’d add to the list? Let me know in the comments – which I am reading, by the way, even if I’m very slow on answering any!