Depotting MAC eyeshadows

I went a bit MAC eyeshadow crazy in the last few weeks and now have a whole bunch of eyeshadows banging around in my makeup case which is great because of the variety of looks I can now try but it’s impossible to find the colour I need when I need it! I got so frustrated that I decided to depot all my eyeshadows and went on to ebay and bought 2 15-pan MAC Pro Palettes.

In preparation of these palettes arriving I tried depotting one of my eye shadows as a trial. I depotted the colour ‘Steamy’ as it’s the shadow I’ll miss the least if anything happened to it. I searched for the best way to depot and I went with the method that left the container mostly in tact as I wanted to make sure that my empty pots were still ‘Back 2 Mac’-able. I also chose this method because it was the safest (I’m so incredibly accident prone so this is a plus!) plus it was the least messy method.

You’ll need

– a hair straightener or an iron
– some foil
– a pin
– some tweezers
– a knife or something else with a sharp, thin edge.
– your MAC eyeshadow (obviously!)
– some rubbing alcohol or alcohol wipes
– self adhesive magnets

I shouldn’t have to warn you but there is potential to burn yourself so BE CAREFUL!

1. First you need to seperate the top part of the container that holds the eyeshadow away from the bottom part.

When you open up the lid, you’ll see that there’s a line that runs across the front which is just above the little latch that the lid closes on to.

You need to get a knife or something sharp, flat and pointed and put it into that line and then gently wiggle it around and the top part should just pop off.

2. Now that you have seperated them, you need to turn your straightener or iron on (I used my cheap Remington straightener that I don’t even use anymore for my hair) and put it on the highest setting.

Next you take your piece of foil and lay it on the plate of the straightener and put the eyeshadow on top so that the black plastic is sitting on the foil. After a while, you’ll see that the black plastic will start to warp and when it does pull the shadow off the foil. You’ll have to estimate how long to leave it on there for because it depends on how hot your straightener is. I just kept checking mine every 10 seconds or so.

3. Once you have the shadow off the straightener, quickly take a pin or an unbent paperclip and poke a hole right in the middle of the plastic until you start to see some of the metal tin. If the plastic is too hard to do this, put it back on the foil and heat it up for a bit longer.

4. Once you have managed to poke a hole in the plastic, use the pin or paperclip to push the tin up out of the plastic. It should move pretty easily now as the heat should have melted the glue. Make sure you have a pair of tweezers handy so you can pull out the shadow pan from the plastic.

5. Now you should have the pan seperated from the plastic.

You can now go ahead and clip the plastic back into the container and then you can take it ‘Back-2-MAC’. As for the eyeshadow pan, it’ll still have some glue residue on it so wipe it down with an alcohol wipe of some sort.

6. Next, you take the self-adhesive magnet (I bought mine from ebay) and stick it on to the bottom of the eyeshadow pan.

7. You don’t want to forget what the colour is so you need to label it in some way. You can use a label maker or something like that to put on top of the magnet or you can do what I did and just take the sticker off the bottom of the eyeshadow container and stick it on top of the magnet.

You can carefully peel it off as is or you can follow what I did by putting the container on the foil and back on to the straightener for a few seconds so that the glue softens up a bit.

Once the glue softens, it is much easier to pull off the sticker.

Voila! Your eyeshadow is now depotted, magnetised and ready to be placed in your palette.