I travel several times each year. As I travel with hand luggage only, I’m getting used to running into the limitations on liquids:

Liquids in hand luggage

There are restrictions on the amount of liquids, creams and gels that can be carried in hand luggage onboard all flights. A maximum of 1 liter of liquid, creams and gels are permitted in hand luggage. Each item must not exceed 100ml. Liquids, creams and gels must be packed in a separate transparent re-sealable bag must be presented at the security checkpoint.

The helpful signs at the airport’s security checkpoint usually show a nearly empty bag, where a tube of toothpaste, a stick of deodorant, and maybe a small bottle of perfume have plenty of room. When I’m flying out, my bag does in fact look a lot like that.

But when I’m coming home from a week of shopping? We’re playing for keeps, darlings.

Said signs also say “do not overfill”. It’s not overfilled if I can close it without bursting a seam. Serious Tetris skills certainly doesn’t hurt.

Here is the lot, unpacked:

With some determination, I could fit:

• Moisturiser (75ml and the biggest item in the lot)
• Two bottles of liquid foundation
• Deodorant
• Two mascaras
• Four lipsticks
• Traveldose of Lemony Flutter
• Concealer
• Two gel eyeliners
• Eyecream
• Perfume
• Dry shampoo (not even sure when or why I picked this up, but uh, it could come in useful, I guess)
• Eye shadow base
• Samples of lip plumper, lip primer, and eye primer
• Handwash
• Eye pencil (which probably didn’t need to go in this bag, but it’s big and I didn’t feel like potentially getting my bag searched for the sake of one bloody pencil)

Let’s not get into the non-liquids I purchased, although packing all of those was certainly an art in itself…