Depotting Eyeshadow: The Journey

So i depoted some of my eye shadows.  As you can see it turned out pretty well and they are all nice and ready to go into my newly made Eyeshadow palette, but since i only had 4 eye shadows to go into it i figured it was a great time to depot some of the rest of my stuff. Since there are a a million and one tutorials out there about how to do this I'm just going to give a brief overview and list of the areas that caused me the most trouble and what to expect while doing this. It can be a bit hard so if your unsure or you love a certain eyeshadow too much then it's better to be safe then sorry.

1. I used a candle to heat my eyeshadow pans, i tried a hair straighter but it took too long and was for me personally too hard to judge when it was ready. With eyeshadow that had packaging similar to Essence the best tell was when i saw a ripple go through the sticker on the bottom and a part of it would fold or bend so i knew it was ready to go. I only sustained one small burn on my finger while doing this, becareful the pans are metal and get quite hot.

2. If you timed it right then the sticker should peel off like a breeze, and hopefully doesn't have any burn marks on it. Some eyeshadow pans have a hole on the back of them where you can push them to dislodge them from the case but despite what some tutorials showed me the Essence packaging has a hole on the back but it doesn't go all the way through to the pan so poking it will do you no good. 

3. Invariably what you will need to do is stick a blade (scalpel) or specialized tool in between the pan and case and wedge it out. In many cases the heat will have loosened the glue enough that at least one side will have a wider spae where you can jam the blade and wedge the pan upwards.

!!! If you start to see the powder begin to crack STOP. Go back and heat it up a bit more.

4. You might need to use our fingers to wedge the pan all the way up as remember there is still hot glue trying to pull it back down. While it's still warm get rid of as much of the glue as possible, it will save you a lot of stress, mess and nail breakage later on.

5. The best way i found to get rid of hot glue one it's dried is some rubbing alcohol and cotton eyar buds swirled in a circular direction followed by a plastic spatula to move it off. If that fails your nails will work but they will get dirty and cracked, as i found out.

I had the most trouble with this  MUA eyeshadow single as instead of loosening the glue underneath all that seemed to happen was the pan would become softer so when i would wedge the blade between the pan and case the pan would bend causing the powder to crack. This one was a complete loss, but if this happens keep the pan - you can either try fix it or make your own pressed eyeshadow out of pigments.

* This shadow of eyeshadow seems to be more crumbly then other colors, not sure why but the Essence eye shadow i had that was almost the exact same color also shattered when i did this, though not quite as dramatically.

The hot glue was quite thick, but so was the bottom of the case which was part of the problem with the MUA. Be careful if your trying to depot these. Do not rush and take your time.

The left over mess, lots of plastic to recycle, and far less plastic clogging up my makeup draws. This is not going to be for everyone, the reason i did it was mainly because i found i had eyeshadows in palettes that i never used because they were packed away. 

Here are some quick notes about which eyeshadow brands proved particularly difficult to depot:

MAC - Easy

Essence - Easy

MUA - Very Hard

Dior - Super Easy

Savvy - Impossible

Gosh - Moderate

Australis - Moderate

Revlon - Super Easy