Friday, July 5, 2013

My Semi-Failed Adventures in Depotting: A Crappy Tutorial

Wet 'n Wild eyeshadows are the little gems of the drugstore beauty scene. At a few bucks a pop, they have some seriously amazing pigmentation, and the texture is smooth as buttaaaaaah. I honestly prefer the formula to Urban Decay (in fact, I find Urban Decay to be vastly overrated, but that's another whole post altogether.)

When the eyeshadow trios and palettes are such a good value, you may accidentally acquire a large amount. This is where the problem starts for me. I live in a dorm room for the vast majority of the year (such tiny spaces!), then I'm back and forth between school, home, and my temporary apartment for my summer internship. When this is the circumstance, portability, convenience, and decreasing clutter is the name of the game. I was starting to be bothered by all the individual palettes. The answer, it seemed was depotting.

I've heard all the horror stories: smoke detectors blaring because of melted plastic, poor little powders smashed to smithereens by errant tweezers, huge messes coming from small packages. But, I had a free Monday night and the personally rare urge for a DIY project.

After some research, I acquired the following items from Walmart:


Two Crayola watercolor palettes, lighters, fancy shmancy duct tape sheets, magnetic sheets, and your desired shadows. 


I was going to be using Walking on Eggshells, Silent Treatment, Cool as a Cucumber, the infamous Comfort Zone, and my baby, the limited edition Drinking a Glass of Shine...as a sidenote, how the heck did they come up with that name! The special thing about that palette is that it is all matte, and they decide to throw the word "Shine" in the title?! How drunk were the Wet 'n Wild execs during that meeting?

First things first: I took out the watercolors and brush from the Crayola palettes. At the store, there was a generic brand that was a few bucks cheaper, but the case was yellow. And I detest yellow. So I splurged for white. I know, big spender over here! But yeah, the watercolors are still sitting on my coffee table. I don't know what to do with them, because I don't think I've used something like that since my age was in the single digits, but I feel bad tossing them. But after removing this, the first step is melting down the little nobs that held the brush in place. This did not go as planned.


Look, I'm using a lighter indoors! I'm so adult! But you can tell on the bottom left that this was harder than I thought. It was sort of impossible to cleanly scrape off those nobs. So now my palette has awkward bumps in it. Ah well, such is life.

Next, I peeled the stickers off the backs of the shadows, like so.


Then, I forgot to take pictures of the actual depotting of the shadows. Good job, Maria. But basically, I held the lighter under each well of shadow for about 20 seconds. I then used an old Urban Outfitters gift card to gently pry each pan up. I did it very slowly, but I actually only had one small casualty during this process...a sizable chunk of the gorgeous taupe in the Silent Treatment palette got knocked off. Moment of silence please...thank you.


Here's all the little beauties lying there, oh so naked!


AND HERE LIES THE SKELETONS OF MY ENEMIES, aka the melted remains.

So here's where it goes off the tracks. I had intended to make a magnetized palette, like those overly expensive Z palettes. Walmart had some magnetic adhesive sheets, which I thought would work super well.


Looks nice, right? Well, these magnetic sheets are crap. They are not capable of holding anything, let alone delicate eye shadow pans. So in a game time decision, I drove to the gas station and bought super glue. Super gluing the shadows down means I can't move them around or take them out, but I was happy with the order I put them in, and the case ended up being pretty sleek. I cut the pretty, shiny duct tape sheets to cover up the black of the magnetic sheets. You can't really even see them once the shadows were in, but it's nice in theory.


Aaaaand, here's the end result! I'm actually really please with it. It will be super easy to travel with, and I can now create a huge variety of looks with this one behemoth. I also depotted some blushers to put in the other palette, but I haven't worked my way up to putting it all together yet. Maybe someday I'll stop procrastinating and finish it...but considering how long it took me to put together a blog, this probably won't happen.


Super sexy bonus shot of my fingers with shadow literally glued to them. This didn't come off for at least 24 hours. It was super fun using CAD software the next day while I had green pigment all over my hands.

Well thanks for reading my VERY FIRST BLOG POST OMG. I'm really excited to start this blog, and I thought this would be a fun first post.

Until next time, kiddos, PEACE.



2 comments:

  1. this is such a good idea, i'm now lusting after your palette! Walking on Eggshells is impossible to get hold of in the UK!

    lucygum.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you! I really like having it all together because I've had a blast making different combinations out of the numerous palettes. Walking on Eggshells is so lovely! I don't use the Browbone shade because I personally prefer a matte highlight, but the lid color really reminds me of UD's Sin and the Crease shade goes with pretty much every look.

      xo, Maria.

      Delete