How to depot an Eyeshadow/ Blush

How to depot an Eyeshadow/ Blush

As i already explained how I depot my lipsticks, I thought I should also show you how I depot my eyeshadow and blush. Basically it works entirely the same for both, there are some thing you should keep in mind for both of them. 

So let's get started:  

What you need: baking paper; hair straightener, magnet tape, printable label sheets, blush/ eyeshadow to depot, spatula, tweezers, printer Optional: laminating machinery, laminating pouches, white paper, hole punch

You start of with your eyeshadow or blush. This would work for any other brand too.

Take your spatula and find the little crack at the front where the case usually snaps close. Wiggle your spatula around (gently !!!!) until you can remove the inner part.

It should look like that.

When depotting a blush you should try to get underneath the top plastic part from the side. Normally this is more gentle than trying it from the front (I broke one of my blushes when I tried it the same way I did with the eyeshadows.) It is important to get underneath the blush as far as you can and then lift it up gently. If you just lift from the side, the probability of breakage are much higher. You have to be way more gentle when depotting a blush compared to an eyeshadow.

Looks like a depotted eyeshadow, just bigger :-)

Set your straightening iron on the highest setting, put some baking paper on the heating plates (it will protect them) and than put you eyeshadow/blush on it. It needs to stay there until the glue (and most of the time a little bit of the plastic too) is melted. For me it took about 1 minute. 

Take off the eyeshadow with your tweezers. The pan is very hot and you would burn your fingers by touching it!

Take some pointy tweezers and push the metal pan on a piece of tissue paper. Only push if is loosens up easily. If you need to use a lot of force, put it back on the flat iron! Your shadow could break!

The back of the depotted eyeshadow with the melted glue.

Sometimes you could also remove the blush with your fingers, because the outside doesn't get as hot as it is a bigger pan. To be on the save side I would use tweezers again.

As you can see, sometimes the plastic melts a little bit more. Just push the blush gently on the tissue paper.

You can remove the glue with rubbing alcohol (if you get in in Austria at a pharmacy ask for "Benzinum" = "Wundbenzin") and some old towel. Normally you have to throw the towel out afterwards, because you can't get the glue out in the washing machine. Don't worry if some rubbing alcohol gets on your blush/shadow. It will dry in less than a minute without harming the powder. You should soak the powder in it though :-)

An alternative if the rubbing alcohol doesn't work to get the glue off: nitro-cellulose combination thinner. This one smells really bad and nothing should get on top of your shadow/blush. Sometimes even your palettes smell like this for some weeks. You should only use this one outside!!! 

This one basically works like the nitro-cellulose combination thinner but smells like oranges. It is more pricey and you would probably need more than one if you depot a lot of shadows.

Take your magnetic tape and cut off pieces as wide as your pan.

It can be pretty hard to get the labels off the original pot. Therefor I print them myself. I got some Avery printable label sheets.

This is how the pans look with the magnetic tape and label.

If you get magnetic sheets and sticky paper without precut labels on them you could cut them yourself. There are a lot of companies that sell hole punches like that. This one is 1 inch/ 2,54 cm round-punch.

This size would perfectly fit the eyeshadow pans as well as the blush pans.

This is how one of my blush palettes looks like. I printed a label for the inside that tells me the name of the blush as well as the finish. You could go to MAC Cosmetics and check out the different finishes they offer.

On the front I put a smaller label with the names and finishes as well. I often look for a special finish, for instance a matte blush. This makes it easier to find the one I was looking for.

I label my eyeshadow palettes the same way.

On the front of my eyeshadow palettes I put two labels: First what range of colour is in it and second the names. There isn't enough space to put the finish on the front too. Besides that, if I look for a dark brown shadow all of them are in one palette, no matter what kind of finish.

To make the labels I used an excel file. I printed them out and laminated them. I put all of the labels on with double sided sticking tape (the thing one).

The easier way would be to buy the pan form :-)