Years of living in a tiny New York apartment cured me of any packrat tendencies. In fact, I love the light feeling I get from de-cluttering my closets and cabinets. So when the time came to clean out my bathroom cabinets [0], I thought it'd be a quick-and-easy project. No such luck.

Inspired by the guidelines from LIME's spring cleaning feature [0], I cruised through a bunch of steps. I don't buy a lot of stuff in bulk, so there was little packaging to recycle. I only have one hairbrush. Also, I replaced all my expired medications a few months back.

I put a couple of frayed towels in a shopping bag, and made a mental note to donate them to the animal clinic down the street.

Then things got trickier. Somehow, I'd amassed a large collection of hair products that just don't work for me. Hiding in the back of a cabinet -- long forgotten and barely used -- were bottles of leave-in conditioners, tubs of molding pastes, tubes of styling gel, curl-boosters, straighteners, frizz-fighters, a bottle of something that promises to give my hair a dirty texture (what? why?), and (oh, the irony) a specially-formulated shampoo to remove product build-up.

I couldn't bear to toss out these products because they were expensive, cutely packaged, or came from chic salons. And then, there was the guilt. After all, less fortunate people the world over suffer from bad hair days, so who am I to throw away perfectly good product?

Instead, I made up little gift bags for friends so that these products will find better homes. The only exception was the spray that makes your hair look dirty... I'm still not sure what to do with that.

Then it came time to toss out expired make-up. The guide recommends throwing away cosmetics that are older than six months to prevent bacterial build-up.

Here's where I draw the line. Perhaps some people can afford to replace their make-up every six months, but I'm not one of them. Apart from old mascara, I've used expired make-up all my life and lived to tell. I did, however, put aside a few M.A.C. products to take advantage of their recycling program [0].

Finally, I held onto a tin of lip gloss that I bought while on vacation in 2003. It's one of those rare, perfect, hard-to-find colors that goes with a couple of my favorite cocktail party dresses. The truth is, that lip gloss really is dangerous -- not because it's contaminated, but because wearing it inevitably leads to some reckless and irresponsible flirting. Would you throw it out?