Diva Style: :Makeup Mondays:

HAPPY MAKEUP MONDAYS, DIVA STYLE READERS!

It's TUTORIAL TIME!! As a freelance makeup artist, I make a lot of trips to the MAC store. As a part of the pro community, I often get on the good side of a lot of the associates, and get the inside scoop on tips and tricks they use. For some time, I had been trying to determine how to depot all of my single shadows for use in palettes. Palettes are just more convenient to use when creating a look, as opposed to digging around searching for individual shadows. They also assist in easily accessing alternative color schemes when beating your face. After trying one suggestion from an associate, one of my shadows was nearly destroyed, so I swore off attempting to depot that way. BUT more recently, after talking to a different associate who happened to be more briefed in these efforts, the code's been CRIZZACKED!

Here's what you will need:

Shadows to depot

A flattening iron

Aluminum foil

Butter knife

Optional materials: Label-maker, Goo Gone

1. To begin, heat up your flattening iron. Use a surface that is heat-resistant and be extremely careful not to burn yourself during this process!

2. Carefully, pop the metal compartment of eye shadow completely out of the plastic MAC pot. At this point, it will still be enshrouded in a smaller piece of plastic. There is a tiny crevice at the front of the pot that will allow you to pop it out with relative ease, circled in the picture below:

3. Tear off a sheet of aluminum foil slightly larger than your MAC container and place underneath it. You can tear off a big enough sheet to double over in size to provide extra protection against the heat, if necessary. The foil is used as a barrier between the plastic shadow pot and the flattening iron, as not to melt the plastic. Carefully place onto your heated flat iron.

4. Press down with the knife for 20-30 seconds to saturate the bottom of the foil with heat from the iron.

5. Gently lift from iron (BE CAREFUL: IT'S HOT!) and push through the aluminum foil with the butter knife to pop out the shadow tin.

6. (Optional Tip) :

Once removed, the bottom part of the metal tin will be quite sticky (from the glue that holds it in the plastic pot). I decided to just live with this and placed in my palette anyway, as trying to get the glue off seemed like it would be a big headache and could potentially damage the shadow.

Important note: Leaving the glue will make it more difficult to remove your eye shadow tin from the palette once all of the product is depleted, but I recommend using some Goo Gone to help with the stickiness.

7. Once you depot your shadow, you can place it in the palette like so:

8. (Optional Tip) :

Use your label-maker to create nametags for the shadows in their order of appearance in your palette, since they will no longer have labels on the bottom once depotted.