(Don't panic, I put it all back together again.)
I love makeup. I love it so much that it can sometimes take an hour to do what most people can do in ten minutes. I just keep getting distracted by my endless collection of pretty things. I thought that having my own custom palette would speed up my morning routine, because I would have all my basic eye and cheek colours in one place. Plus it would be great for travelling. Sounds like a good idea, right? So I grabbed a magnetic eyeshadow palette and got ready to depot a few essentials.
The problem was, most of my products were not designed to be put in a palette. Some of my favourite eyeshadows put up such a fight when I was trying to get them out of their packaging, I ended up distorting the pan. My most-used highlighters and blush shades were baked, and therefore too tall to fit in the palette.
Maybe I’d been watching a bit too much of The Makeup Breakup at this point, but I decided there was only one solution.
I ordered a ton of empty makeup pans, some rubbing alcohol, as well as a spatula and palette set, and began repressing my makeup into smaller, magnetic pans.
If you’ve never tried repressing makeup, please do. It’s so much fun. Using the spatula, destroy the product you want to repress in whatever fashion you like. I like to make the pieces as small as possible, like grains of sand. Then add some rubbing alcohol to your small pile of colourful sand until it resembles wet cement. The amount of alcohol will vary from mixture to mixture, so just keep adding small amounts until you're happy with the consistency. Put the mixture in an empty pan, and neaten it up by putting a tissue on top and pressing down something that’s around the same size (like a pot of lip balm). Tidy up the edges a little, and leave it to dry.
Ta da! It’s that easy. You can get your supplies fairly cheaply on eBay, AliExpress, or Amazon. (Disclaimer: I would strongly recommend wearing gloves if you suffer from sensitive skin, or have a condition such an eczema or psoriasis when using rubbing alcohol.)
Once I started I just couldn’t stop.
After I'd repressed the formulas I knew I wanted in my palette, I still had some empty pans so I decided to get a little more creative. I wanted to mix different makeup products together. I started digging out makeup I don’t reach for, and thought about what I could mix it with to make it better.
I’ve never had a perfect contour shade, so I mixed some taupe eyeshadows with a face powder to make something suitably pale. I took a highlighter that was too dark and mixed it with white satin eyeshadow to brighten it up. I mixed blushes that were too pink and too orange together to make something more neutral. Sometimes I mixed liquid highlighters in there to see what would happen. Once it dried, if I wasn't entirely satisfied with my creation, I would simply smash it up and start again.
The great thing about destroying makeup to repress it is that there is no longer such a thing as "bad" makeup. Makeup that doesn’t work for me can be transformed into something that does. And it gives me the freedom to make shades that I want to try, but can’t find. Not to mention, it's really fun. It's actually my favourite hobby at the moment.
Have you ever thought about mixing makeup?
What do you think - does this look like something you want to try, or does it break your heart to see broken makeup? Do you want to see more content about the products I mix? Let me know in the comments.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and buy some more empty magnetic palettes to store the new shades I've made...
