Makeup is the donation category where the sealed-only rule bends, but only in one place and only by specific rules. Nearly every shelter and hygiene program takes new products exclusively, for the same reasons they take only sealed soap. One national organization has built a careful list of what gently used items it can accept, and knowing that list is the difference between a useful box and a discarded one.
Project Beauty Share collects personal hygiene, cosmetic, and beauty products and distributes them through nonprofits serving women and families facing abuse, addiction, homelessness, and poverty. Unlike most programs, it accepts some used items, and its rules are precise enough to sort against at home.
Donations go to its warehouse at 2718 E Sprague Ave, Spokane WA 99202, open Monday to Thursday 9am to 2pm, or by mail; a flat-rate box is the recommended method and the organization does not cover shipping.
Domestic violence shelters, family shelters, and transitional housing programs take new, sealed cosmetics and personal care products, and they are wanted: a woman arriving with nothing is given the basics, and makeup is one of the few items that is about dignity rather than survival. The same doors take toiletries and period products, covered in where to donate toiletries. Hygiene banks that supply many agencies at once are the right destination for quantity, such as a workplace drive or a retail overstock.
The Beauty Bus Foundation provides in-home beauty services to people whose serious illness prevents them from getting to a salon, and it assembles Beauty Bags of new and unused products for patients around the country, including blushes, mascara, nail polish, and hair tools. Hospital and cancer support programs run similar comfort-bag projects, often through a volunteer coordinator. All of them are new-only, for infection-control reasons that mirror the rules for donated toys in hospitals.
Programs that prepare people for interviews, Dress for Success among them, keep a small stock of new cosmetics alongside professional clothing, because an interview outfit is the point at which people ask for it. Career closets and workforce centers take sealed products. Our guides to women's shelters and clothing and men's interview clothing cover the same organizations from the clothing side.
Used liquids, opened mascara, old lipsticks, and anything past its date cannot be donated anywhere, and the reason is straightforward: eye and lip products carry bacteria between users and there is no way to inspect them. Some cosmetics counters and brands run take-back programs that recycle empty and used packaging, and a few municipal hazardous waste programs accept nail polish and acetone-based products, which should not go in household trash. Everything else is landfill, and the honest lesson is at the point of purchase rather than disposal.
Last updated September 2026. Errors: [email protected]
The difference is sorting labor. A shelter handing a product to a resident cannot inspect it, so it needs the seal to do that work. Project Beauty Share runs a warehouse with volunteers who sort, inspect, and sanitize, which is what allows a barely used compact to be passed on safely while a mascara wand cannot be, whatever it looks like. The line it draws is not arbitrary: it tracks exactly which products contact the eye or lip and which sit behind a pressed surface.
Cosmetics are the top of a shelf whose base is soap, toothpaste, deodorant, and period products, all of which shelters run short of year-round and none of which food assistance covers. If you are packing a box, the base items do more good than the top ones; where to donate toiletries covers what shelters ask for first.