Fixing Shattered Makeup

There is nothing worst than dropping your favorite powder based makeup and watching it shatter into a million pigmented pieces. We've all been there, it seriously sucks. But there is a way to fix it, and it just takes a few items and about five minutes of work. You'll never have to throw away that brand new eye shadow again.

I actually bought this blush specifically to smash up for this tutorial, my only single blush is over halfway used an I thought a full one would show the steps better. These are surprisingly hard to shatter when you want them to, but I swear if I were to drop my favorite palette on my bed the whole thing would break. My husband got a kick out of watching me throw this blush across the room trying to break it.

For this tutorial, you will need:

• Broken powder makeup, like an eye shadow, blush, or bronzer. This will not work on palettes unfortunately.
• Isopropyl Alcohol
• Plastic Wrap
• A butter knife or very small spatula like what comes with fancy face creams
• A toothpick

First, you want to try and put as much of the powder back into the pan as possible. The tightly wrap it with the plastic wrap. While this step is actually optional, it will save you a messy headache so I really recommend using the plastic wrap.

Take the butt end of your butter knife and smash all the chunks of makeup up into a loose powder. Without the plastic wrap this would be seriously messy but doable. The smaller the chunks the easier the next step will be.

There, nice and crushed. Try and keep the powder in the pan, use your knife to shift it back over if you need to.

Now add the isopropyl alcohol a few drops at a time until everything is wet. I used maybe a teaspoon total once I was all done. Don't worry if you add too much, the alcohol will evaporate after we're done, it may just take longer.

Once you have enough of the alcohol in it, mix it all up till it's a blush clay. I found a toothpick was the easiest to mix everything up. It should look like a gross mess when you are done.

Now take the blade end of your butter knife and smooth/press everything into place. Think of this like icing a cake, fill in any gaps first then focus on getting it smooth. This part took the longest, but I was done in like 2 minutes max.

Once all smoothed out, set aside to dry. This can take anywhere from a few hours to all night depending on the size of the makeup and how much alcohol you used. Mine was an all nighter, I imagine a pan of eyeshadow would take just a few hours.

Once dry and set you can clean up the edges and it is good to go. A word of advice, sometimes they can dry a little harder than they were before so make sure you don't press the clay so hard into place that you make a brick. This technique can also be used to even out makeup you've hit pan on, I will probably be doing this with my favorite blush sometime this month. Good luck fixing your makeup and let me know down in the comments the busted makeup disaster that brought you to tears.