When life is in full swing – with a job, school, keeping fit and an active social life – it’s more often than not that we’re putting ourselves together for the next block on our schedule in someplace other than the serenity of our own bathrooms and bedrooms. Have backpack, will travel, right? With a change of clothes in tow, make-up essentials in our hand bags and a rear view mirror, we’re set. Or are we?

Have you ever thought you packed it all to find out you’ve forgotten your eyelash curler? Or you brought along your nail polish but forgot the nail polish remover? Sometimes we’re lucky enough to be passing a Walgreen’s just as we realize this and the fix is as easy as a quick stop to add yet another bottle of nail polish remover to the collection. Other times, we’re not so lucky. These tips won’t solve all your problems, but here are five creative ways to made due in a pinch.

Curl your Eyelashes with a Spoon

Say what? You heard me and even if I repeated myself, it still wouldn’t make sense. To further confuse, let me say this can also be done with an old gift card. Check out the issuu version of this article for detailed, step-by-step instructions with pictures.

Luscious Lips on Your Eyes and Cheekbones Too

More than once, I’ve found myself out and about without make-up – like after crashing at a friend’s house – and needing to face the public with a pale face. Despite the desperate situation, I refuse to go buy an entire new collection of make-up. But what’s this? I have lipstick in my purse. This is not good for your complexion, so don’t make a habit of it – like I know you wouldn’t anyway – but in a pinch, you can use your lipstick to put some blush in your cheeks and to add color to your eyebrows. It’s enough to get by in case anyone sees you on your way home.

Run in Your Panty Hose?

Oh, c’mon girls, this is so easy I shouldn’t even be counting it. Just take them off and throw them in the garbage! I still see department stores full of them, but really, who needs panty hose anymore? Even brides are going around with bare feet. Ok, maybe there are still a couple of situations in which you must have nyloned legs. If this is the case, there’s the old standby clear nail polish to stop a run. Hair spray and glue also work, but not quite as well. If you successfully stop the run and then need to hide it, try gathering the feet of the hose and folding them over, stepping on the excess to shorten the hose if the run is down on the ankle. If it’s not, maybe you can twist the leg to rotate the run into the inner leg and conceal the run by strategically keeping your legs together (a practice I recommend for a number of reasons!).

French Manicure with Liquid Paper

Did you score an important social engagement just after work on the very day you’ve left the house with ragged nails? Whether you have no polish or polish that’s chipping at the ends, give yourself a quick French manicure with liquid paper. Like Cinderella’s coach, this elegant fix won’t last past midnight – it scratches off fairly easy, but it works like a dream to take you from bare nails to ballroom nails – and it dries in no time! If your nails are so bad off that white-out on the tips is of no help, find a nail file or emery board if you can and buff down the old polish until it’s not so rough and chipping. Then find a red, pink or purple marker, even a Sharpie, and you guessed, color in those ugly nails! If all you have is a black or blue marker, you’re better off with raggedy nails – very few people can pull off black or blue nails without drawing so much attention to them that it becomes apparent you used a marker to color your nails.

Basically Buttons

Have you ever popped a button that you really needed – like the one in the center of your chest? This fashion emergency can send a gal to the bathroom until help arrives in the form of a safety pin or worse, a notebook or file folder to hold over your chest with folded arms while you make your way to the car or subway to get home. There’s a host of other worse scenarios where there’s no one to assist, no way to get home (like when you’re travelling) and sneaking out to buy a new shirt is just not an option. Here are a few suggestions for those waking nightmares.

First, carry a safety pin with you at all times. There’s usually one little zipper pocket in my handbag that I just don’t use for anything. Put a safety pin in there and forget about it. It could save the day. Secondly, if you somehow could score a needle and thread but just don’t have a button – let’s say you lost it when it popped off – you can pop off another button from a less critical spot on the shirt and sew it in the problem spot. Depending on what kind of a button you lost, you might be able to attach another one from the neck or near the waste with a staple by straightening the staple, sticking it through the button and the shirt and then use a coin to mash down the staple on the inside of the blouse. You’re going to need all the fine motor control you can muster for this, so just relax, breathe deep and try to act like there’s nothing riding on this.

Finally, my favorite fix is to take off an earring – either a post or a hook and create a new button with it. If your post earrings are too small and will slip through the button hole, stick a new hole through your shirt with the post, just to the side of the button hole. If you have wire hook earrings, thread the hook through the button hole and then bring it back to the outside of the shirt by poking a hole through the fabric. Bend it together to make a ring out of the wire hook and that will hold the shirt together. This fix is going to draw some attention, and you can just take that opportunity to reinforce to your boss or coworkers how very resourceful you are.

Sorry to say that if you popped that button open with force, that is, if your shirt was really too tight to begin with, these remedies aren’t going to last long. Your best bet would be to put a book over your chest and rush home or to the store to buy a new shirt.

Got more desperate measures to share with our readers? Email them to us and we’ll post them online!