This Woman Depotted 200 Eye Shadows to Create Custom Mega Palettes

Adjacent to my vanity in my apartment, you can find a tote bag filled to the brim with palettes. It's not the best organizational system, and they still take up a ton of space, but it works for me. One woman faced the same problem, so she took matters into her own hands. Instead of having a bunch of palettes stack up in her room, she depotted them all and put the shadows into some color-coordinated mega palettes.

Gina Luttrell recently shared her depotting story on the MakeupAddiction subreddit, and I was gripped. I respect anyone who is this dedicated to making their beauty routine more streamlined and organized. And when I say dedicated, I mean, Luttrell spent a whole 20 — I repeat, two-zero — hours making her mega palettes happen.

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Her reasoning for taking almost a day out of her busy life to do so was she wanted to see all her shadows in one place, save space in her new apartment, and use her palette collection to its fullest potential. "I would forget that I had colors," she tells Allure. "I had to sort through palettes to find what I wanted, and I had to pull out tons of different palettes and swatch to find what I wanted. I needed to be able to have it all in front of me, and that required a full depot. Now I can see what I have and can save my brain space for creativity."

To embark on her depotting journey, Luttrell gathered up her 17 eye shadow palettes, six empty magnetic palettes from Amazon and Etsy, a couple knives, and an electric screwdriver. "I didn’t use heat at all," she adds.

First, she worked on taking all the palettes apart to free the pans. Two of the knives she used broke, so the screwdriver proved to be the best option. "It was small and very thin," she says. "Because it was a building tool, it was sturdy and pliable enough that it held up to depotting." The easiest palettes to depot turned out to be Juvia's Place's because they are made from 100 percent cardboard. (Many palettes often are made of rigid plastic.) The hardest, on the other hand, was from Viseart.

I had to ask Luttrell if cutting up and depotting any of the palettes pained her. I can't even watch those lipstick smashing videos without feeling a little sad. "The only palette that was really 'emotionally' hard to pull apart was the Kat Von D Mi Vida Loca Remix palette," she says. "It's my absolute favorite — I have a fondness for rainbows, and I really loved the color wheel aspect of it. It made utilizing color theory that much easier, but it was easily the largest one and the one that most needed to be depotted, so I overcame my fear and made it happen." She added that it was a gift from her best friend, and she was afraid to break the shadows in the process because the palette was limited edition and hard to find now.

Next, Luttrell removed the glue from the back of all the pans. Surprisingly, translucent powder ended up helping her in this process. "When I was struggling with getting the glue off, I figured if I couldn't remove the glue, I could probably neutralize it," she says. "It's similar in principle to setting your foundation or concealer. The powder sticks to the sticky part, leaving a smooth finish."

Once all of her shadows were ready for their new shared homes, Luttrell started arranging them by shape and color. All the circular pans had their own palette, while the rectangular and square ones were placed in others. From there, she went by the ROYGBIV spectrum. She also made some of her own neutral palettes that ranged from warm to cool.

Now that all her eye shadows are depotted, Luttrell says creativity has been increased and she's rediscovered some new shadows that have been in hiding for a while. "This morning, in fact, I used Urban from the Urban Decay Electric Palette and a bright orchid color from a Morphe palette — both colors I hadn't touched in six months or more," she says. "There is also something incredibly satisfying about seeing a rainbow on your desk every morning, no?" Agreed.

You can shop Morphe's Jaclyn Hill Eyeshadow Palette now for $38 on morphebrushes.com.

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