If you have low or no vision, how do you keep track of your toiletries, makeup, and personal care products? Jaz from Insight4Blind walks you through how you can use WayAround to organize your products and record lots of detailed information. You can also use WayAround on electronics like clippers or straightening irons to describe your preferred settings.

Check out the video here and read below for the transcript.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Jaz from the Insight4Blind channel on YouTube. I’m a blind occupational therapist and I’m here today to show you how WayAround can help you to identify and replace all of your personal care products.

With all of the products on the market today, it is next to impossible to know what’s what if you can’t read those labels. Luckily Way Around makes it quick and easy if you have low vision or no vision. But before we get started here are a few helpful tips.

Remember, when you create your tags you want to make sure you have enough information so that you can replace the product later on. So in your description, keep it real simple such as “shampoo.” Then what brand, what kind of shampoo, that’s the kind of stuff you put down in the details. So you choose your detail type, Personal Care Product, and then you can put all the details you want such as: is it volumizing shampoo? Is it hydrating shampoo? You can even put a link to that product if you need to replace it online. You can also say where you find that particular product in the store that you shop in such as “Back wall all the way to the left”—any kind of detail that’s going to help you to find this product can be saved on your WayTag.

Be sure that you put all of the details you need no matter what personal care product you’re labeling on your WayTag. If you don’t remember how to create all these details on your WayTag refer to the How to Create a WayTag video that’s on wayaround.com or the Insight4Blind channel on YouTube.

We all have personal care products that we use in the shower or around the tub, but you certainly don’t want to use your smartphone in the shower. But that’s okay because there are a couple of WayTags that are actually waterproof, and that would be the small and the large buttons. So for products like shampoo and conditioner you don’t necessarily need to tag both of them if they’re the same brand. Take one of those buttons put it on a rubber band and put it around one of those bottles and you’ll always know when you feel that tag that is your shampoo, for example. The one without the tag would be the conditioner.

You also want to use organizational techniques to help you to know what’s what in the shower or around the tub. For example, my shampoo is always close to the edge of the shelf and the conditioner is always back in the corner. Now if it’s a shared space, like you have a spouse, and you’ll both use the same shower and tub area, try to keep your products separated from each other so you always know what’s what. For example my husband’s products are always over here in a different place and this shelf is dedicated just to my products to make it easier.

It’s always best practice to label your prescription salves and ointments because you always want to know what it is used for, when it expires, what the prescription number is, and what number to call when you have to go ahead and renew that prescription. Be sure to pick a tag that you can remove and reuse easily. For example, even though something might come in a tube usually that tube is inside of a box. Keep the box because it makes it easy for you to use a WayClip that you can easily remove. If you have another container like a jar or a tube that doesn’t come in a box, that’s okay. Take a WayClip, put it on a rubber band or a pipe cleaner, and you’re good to go. The point is these things are great because months later when you go through that drawer and you find things that don’t feel familiar to you, you’ll be able to identify them and know what they are.

A lot of personal care products come in tubes and bottles that feel very similar to each other and that’s where WayAround can really come in handy. For example, I once had a patient who didn’t label her stuff and she had toothpaste and hemorrhoid cream both in tubes that felt very similar. She accidentally used the hemorrhoid cream when she should have been using the toothpaste. Yuck! You don’t want that to happen to you, so that’s why it’s really important to go ahead and label your stuff.

Now if you only have two things that feel very similar, you want to keep it simple. So for example I have my moisturizer in one tube and I’ve got my makeup remover in another. They feel identical to me. The moisturizer is what I use first in the day. I don’t have any kind of marking on it. The other one I use at night. I have a WayTag sticker right on the top so I can easily tell them apart.

Now with my hair care products, even though they’re all in bottles that are slightly different, I can’t remember which one is what. So that’s why I took some WayClips and pipe cleaners and I have each of these hair care products labeled. Now the one I use the most is actually on a rounded WayTag as opposed to the other two that I use less frequently which are on square WayClips. So that way, even just by touch I can quickly and easily tell the difference between them.

You can even use WayAround to help you with your electronics in your self-care stations. For example I have a flat iron here that I absolutely love, and so I created a WayTag by taking one of the buttons and threading a pipe cleaner around it so I could wrap it around the cord. On the WayTag I have the exact name and model of this, in case I ever have to get a new one. It’s a digital device and so every time I push the up or down arrow it’s changing the temperature of it. Now I can’t always remember how much it’s changing in increments, so what I did was I saved that to the description on my WayTag. Check it out.

Phone: Read button. Ready to scan. Ready to scan. Adjust in 25 degrees increments.

Jaz: Pretty cool, huh! You can use it in other ways with your electronics, like for example I have my electronic toothbrush here and I did the same thing with one of the buttons. They are waterproof, so it’s good to have them around wet areas and I put on here the information for replacing the heads on the electronic toothbrush. Now for you guys you can do the same thing with your electronic shavers or any other devices you’ve got around in your self-care area.

Okay ladies, this is the grand finale you’ve all been waiting for! The biggest challenge is makeup. How do you organize your makeup? WayAround makes it simple and easy. I suggest you use a combination of WayTags and good organizational strategies to be independent. So in my drawer here you’ll see I’ve got my shadows and blushes and lipsticks. I’ve got shadows on the left in one type of container and my lipsticks on the right in several different color category containers. I also have them organized according to how often I wear them. For example I use eyeshadows that are in individual jars because they’re easy to mark. When you’re marking them, just FYI in your description use a color that’s meaningful to you, not the color that the brand has given them. For example this is black to me. I think it’s called something fancy like “onyx” for the brand, but that’s okay. The detail type on your tag is where you put that level of detail, because you want to know that when you go to replace it. But when you’re just putting your makeup on, you want to know where the black is. So I have a line here of my shadows. I have the lighter colors on the bottom, darker colors on top. The ones that I wear the most are closest to the outside of the drawer, white on bottom, black on top, dark silver on top, light silver on bottom, gold, pinks and so on.

Another thing you could do is use a small container such as this one. I’ve got my blues in here. You can put a WayTag to to actually mark the container itself, or if you’re low vision, put a regular label on it and mark it with a 20-20 pen. If you travel a lot with your makeup this is a great way to go.

Nowadays, it is hard to find colors that aren’t in a color palette, so I’ve got one here with a WayTag on the front. And I know you’re wondering why just one WayTag with all those colors? Check this out! WayAround has made this so easy for using color palettes, because they now have a feature where you can create multiple headings with information under each heading on one tag. So what I’ve done is I’ve created a heading for each of the colors that I use the most in this palette, and underneath that color I put the location in the palette, such as row one, column one for pink. Then I put “coordinates with” so it tells me what outfits in my closet coordinate best with this color, whether it’s a dress or a shirt or special outfit that I have. So that is a great way that you can use multiple headings in your WayTags.

Now moving on to lipstick. Lipstick is a challenge because of the shape and size of it. You can’t always put a tag directly onto a lipstick container, so I have them divided by colors. I have a heart-shaped container here where I have my reds, because that is my favorite color. Then I’ve got pinks and purples, and in the back I’ve got my neutrals. So individually though, you can take a small ziploc bag such as this one and put a sticker on the outside of the bag to label the lipstick that’s inside. Here’s my favorite one though: mini M&Ms come in the greatest little tubes that are so easy to mark with a round sticker on top. Pop it open, there’s your tub of lipstick, ladies! Pop it back in, you’re good to go and you can grab the tube, throw it in your purse. When you want it, you’ve got all the information that you need.

These are just some ideas to get you started on organizing your drawers so you can be independent and color coordinated. So now you know your way around for tagging all of your personal care products. If you combine WayTags with good organizational techniques, then you’ll be able to identify and replace all of your skin care, hair care, dental care, makeup, and other personal care products that you have to use. And you’ll be able to do it independently!

If you want information about the types of WayTags available, or if you need to order new WayTags go to wayaround.com and don’t forget to subscribe to WayAround’s channel on YouTube so you can get endless ideas for how to use WayTags throughout every room in your home. Also don’t forget to subscribe to my channel, Insight4Blind on YouTube, where I give you the tips, tools, and techniques for living life successfully with vision loss. Remember, my job is to help you learn your Way Around with vision loss. So no worries, you got this! See you next time.