How to: Depot Lipsticks

Depotting lipsticks can be useful on both a professional and personal level.

When I've been working with make up, particularly at catwalk shows, it's really annoying to not be able to see all your shades of lipstick - having to turn them over to read the name, trying to remember the name and which shade that is and opening and closing loads of lids until you find something you're after. Having them depotted and in a palette means all your colours are there for you to see, and it's easy to show your client what colour(s) you are thinking of using.

On a personal level - this is a fantastic way to save a broken lipstick, or if you just fancy having a lipstick palette!

The most useful type of empty container to use seem to be pill boxes. I got this one from Muji to make this palette. I also have some of these which can be separated which I use for mixing lipsticks together, or if we are working as a team of make up artists and all need to use the same colour lipstick. These would be good for you to use for at home, as you can separate one of the compartments for handbag use! You can do this in empty lip-gloss type pots too.

So...  first of all I chose which of my lipsticks I was going to put in my palette

Fact fans will want to know which lipsticks these are!  They are all MAC and shades are as follows:

one - Rebel
two - Myth
three - Morange
four - Lovelorn
five - Patisserie
six - Shy Girl
seven - Vegas Volt
eight - Ravishing
nine - Half 'n' Half
ten - Chatterbox
eleven - Russian Red
twelve - Creme Cup

Twist out your lipstick as far as it will go, then using a scalpel or a knife, cut the lipstick off and into one of the compartments. If your cutting equipment is too large for this part you could use the end of a spoon to scrape out the rest of the product from the container.

Keep going until you have filled your palette, but make sure you lay down the empty containers in order so you know which lipstick is in which place!

You can peel the stickers off the bottom of the original packaging and put them on the palette under the corresponding lipstick, or make your own stickers.

You can leave your lipsticks like that, or if you'd prefer them to look a little neater, you can melt them in the microwave. I was a little sceptical of doing this, worried that it might mess up some of the formula, but after a little online research, and the fact that some of my tutors had done it, I decided to go for it.

I microwaved at 20 seconds at a time until the lipsticks were entirely liquid. I would recommend leaving the palette in the microwave for a while after to enable them to start to solidify to prevent any overspill.

I was too impatient, and got them out immediately - you can see the pink has spilled a little into the nude lipstick where I lifted them and the liquids were higher than the gap in the separator. I will scoop this out once it has hardened.

And there you have it!

Don't forget, if you do this with MAC lipsticks, to take your empty containers back to MAC for free lipsticks!

Hope this has been useful to someone - let me know how you get on! x