J. Rose Online

What happens when you are itchin' to go out on a Saturday night and you text a few people who live in the area to go out and no one gets back to you?

You depot eyeshadows!

Yes, I have been itchin' to go out with my lady friends since Friday night but no one got back to me in time. My best friend lives in San Diego so she's too far away for me to call. Well anyways, I decided to do a little de-potting for my Saturday night. I did not even play WoW. Amazing, right?

I have a tutorial for those that are interested and need help depotting your MAC eyeshadows without heat. I learned this technique from watching a youtube video on it from EnKore a while back.

We go from this....


to this....

Let's get started...

What you'll need:
1. Rubbing Alcohol
2. a Blow Dryer (not used in the depotting process, it's for something else, you'll see)
3. some type of cutter tool (I used wire cutters)
4. MAC eyeshadows in the pot
5. a small knife


*image is clickable to enlarge
Step 1: take your small knife and put the tip in between the crack in the front and wiggle it until the eyeshadow pops out. Be careful when doing this because the eyeshadow can fly out and depending on where it lands it can crack the shadow.


This is what it should look like with the eyeshadow popped out of the casing.


*image is clickable to enlarge
Step 2: Take your cutter tool (wire cutters) and cut in the two spots where the arrows point to in the above picture.


Grip in between the two spots you cut and bend back and forth until it comes off.


It should look like this.


*image is clickable to enlarge
Step 3: Pour some rubbing alcohol into the cap and dip the tip of your knife in the rubbing alcohol. Wedge the wet tipped knife in between the metal pan and the plastic and motion side to side. Re-dip if needed to get more alcohol in between. Don't use too much though. If needed, let it sit while the alcohol dissolves the glue holding the two pieces together. After a few moments, you can take the knife and dig it under and the eyeshadow pan should pop out. Again, be careful so it doesn't fly out and drop causing you to have a broken eyeshadow.


Halfway out...


And this is what the metal pan looks like out of the plastic.


Step 4: There will be some glue still on the bottom of the pan. Take a cotton ball and put some rubbing alcohol on it. Rub off excess glue like you're removing nail polish. And you're done, you have a depotted eyeshadow pan.

Now let's create the label to put on the bottom of the pan.

Step 5: Take your blow dryer and heat up the plastic pot to warm up the glue holding the label to the plastic pot. Be careful not to burn yourself.


Once the plastic pot is very warm to the touch, take the tip of your knife and carefully peel the label off the pot. Once you have enough off, pull the sticker off with your fingers. (We use the heat gun/blow dryer method at work to take off the Windows product key stickers off of computers without ruining it.)


Stick the sticker on adhesive magnet sheet, then cut out.


Step 5: Stick to the bottom of the metal pan.


It should look like this. I didn't do a very good job at cutting in a circle on this one. LOL.


When you're done, put in your palette and you're good to go!


While listening to slow jams on KOST 103.5, I finally got all the eyeshadows depotted and now have fuller palettes and a bunch of eyeshadow pots to turn in to MAC for the Back 2 MAC recycling program.

There you have it. I hope this helps somebody out there.

On a lighter note: Lakers won Game 5 and are still in the game. Mr. Man is not quite happy yet because they are still behind in the series 3-2 with Boston leading. He says he'll get excited if they win Game 6.

P.S. The pictures in this tutorial were actually taken with the camera I'm testing out. I think they are pretty good close up pics. We'll see though....