According to Kondo, you keep only the products that bring joy when you touch them -- the act of touching is very important. It's easier to determine how important something is to you by picking it up. She believes that, in order to truly appreciate the things that are important to you, you first have to ditch the things that have "outlived their purpose."

Unfortunately, even starting with hair care products, I was reduced to a Gollum-like figure, clutching bottles of shine serum like they held the greatest power in all of Middle Earth. Finally, I summoned the strength to toss things that didn't truly make me happy into either the garbage bag or giveaway bag, depending on the state of the product.

And so it went for a while longer. I got into a rhythm. But then I looked around and saw I hadn't made much of a dent; it was like spending an hour at the gym and finding out you burnt significantly fewer calories than you thought (definitely not enough to make up for the ice cream you ate last night).

I sat cross-legged on the floor of my cramped bathroom, the smell of the supposedly scent-free trash bag that housed several pounds worth of products overwhelming me. The products I had decided to keep were scattered around me. And hundreds of products were still awaiting their judgment. It was, in a word, a hellscape.

There was still so much to do, and the act of throwing things out is very emotional (the fact that I had Taylor Swift blasting in the background probably didn't help matters much).

Maybe I'll just put a few things away, I thought. Seems logical, right? Wrong, according to Kondo.

"Start by discarding, all at once, intensely and completely," she says. This means no organizing as you go. You have to get through the discard portion before you can even think about where you're going to put away your pared-down collection of nail polishes, so you don't get distracted and slip back into bad habits later on.

The time I spent being overwhelmed allowed doubt to slip, insidiously, back into my mind. But, I need these products for work, I told myself. Who else is going to try that serum that's been sitting, unopened, for months? But that doesn't fly with Kondo's technique. #NoExcuses.

She cites a client who was a CEO and had business books upon business books that were unread. He wanted to keep all of them, because he might read them "sometime." Or, other clients who made it only halfway through a book but plan to finish it "someday." Real talk from Kondo: Sometime will never come. This is your chance to let it go. For me, that means that the half-used eye cream I tossed aside has served its purpose, and that purpose was to be used halfway.

I know I said I love all my products and they bring me joy; however, certain products bring me more joy. Like my collection of 11 Chubby Sticks. They're all (mostly) different colors, and I use at least one on the daily. I think this gives me a pass to keep them all.

When I got to my primers and highlighters, my resolve began to falter. I have a well-documented love of glitter and makeup primer, but I began to question my love for all the products in my overflowing shoe box. What would Kondo tell me to do?, I asked myself. She wouldn't care that I love primers in general, she would care about which specific ones in my box brought me joy. Resigned, I poured them all out on the floor.

I carefully cradled each one in my hands -- they seemed to look up at me with sad, puppy dog eyes. But I was not to be swayed. According to Kondo, I am setting these things free, and that made me feel less guilty. I repeated a line from the book in my head: To get rid of what you no longer need is neither wasteful or shameful. And no one, not even I, needs a shoebox full of unused highlighters.

Imagine a bookshelf, filled with only the books you love, says Kondo. (She's literally talking about a bookshelf, not speaking metaphorically. This section was all about organizing your books, but it's so applicable to beauty products.) I believe my exact sticky note annotation was, "!!!!!" because my mind was blown.

It's a beautiful image, and this perfectly curated bookshelf became the emblem, the symbol of my journey. I began imagining a bathroom, filled with only products I cherished. It was that extra boost of adrenaline that got me over the finish line.