Depotting: Urban Decay Heavy Metals, BH Cosmetics Zodiac, Besame Snow White, Urban Decay Electric

**Disclaimer: I'm just sharing my experiences here.  If it helps you, awesome.  If you end up jacking up your expensive makeup, don't come for me.  This is just what worked for me! 

It began with the Snow White palette.  Besame's Snow White palette is freaking beautiful but the packaging, while gorgeous, is irritating as heck to use.  You have to hold pages out of the way every time you want to use an eye shadow.  You can use hands or figure out something with a headband or clip but one way or another, you have to hold pages out of your way.  So I wasn't using the palette.  I paid too much money to not use it!  Time to depot, by which I mean remove each individual pan from the original palette and place it in alternative packaging.  This is not about train depots.  Two different words.  Just saying.

The Snow White palette was cake to depot.  The glue isn't too sticky and there are gaps between the pans and the cardboard packaging.  I simply slid one side of a duckbill clip beneath each pan and popped it out.  This did not ruin the original packaging.  I can still display it, and I could glue the pans back in if I wanted to.

See?  Not destroyed.

Chilling on my shelf next to my grandma's bobby clip lady.

Besame Snow White palette in its new home along with the previously depotted UD Alice palette and a few Buxom singles.

Then I got brave and tackled an Urban Decay Electric palette.  I bought a backup on sale for like $15 or something really inexpensive, so that emboldened me to potentially sacrifice a palette.  No sacrifice necessary!  I took a ZPalette spatula (similar to this), wedged it around the seams along the top, and the entire tray holding all the shadows just popped out in one piece.  I did not take pictures of this process and honestly, if you look at your palette and can't see what I mean, I feel like it's best to step back.  You need a certain amount of crafting intuition here.

I wrapped my flat iron's plates in foil, set it to the highest temperature (410F in my case), and used heat to loosen up the glue.  I won't go too far into detail on how I did that; there are numerous tutorials on how to depot using a flat iron already.  Once hot, the pans practically jumped out on their own.  I needed the slightest pressure to one side to get the other side to pop out.  So easy. 

So easy, in fact, that I really got emboldened and decided to depot my Urban Decay Heavy Metals palette.  This is another palette that is awesome but the packaging is stupid.  It didn't annoy me as much as I thought it would, but I also found myself not reaching for it because it was too big and awkward.  I slid the palette out of the case and set the case aside.  The case is not involved here.  I flipped the palette over and used the same depotting spatula to go around the seams and pop the back off.  Again, if you can't see the seams on your palette or you can't see how the heck this would work, I would recommend against trying it.

Once the back of the tray was removed, it seemed like it would be a simple matter of maybe using the oven method to heat up all the pans and pop them out.  LOL!  No.  I used Wayne Goss's method.  Things got a little fumey but no worse than when I made Shrinky Dinks.  The oven method sucked!  I managed to pry out one pan and by then, the rest of the plastic was cold again.  I did manage to pry off the mirror because of the oven and that came in handy.  Once the mirror was gone, I just used my hands and cracked the damn thing in half, like so.

Urban Decay Heavy Metals palette, halved and depotted.

Urban Decay Heavy Metals palette, halved but not yet depotted.

I got frustrated with the oven method and went back to the flat iron once the palette was broken in half.  This worked better because I could heat up two pans at a time.  There's a plastic lip that acts as a stopper at the end of the flat iron, and that was a little bit of a pain, but it worked.

Back of half a Heavy Metals palette.  I heated up vertical columns of two at a time.

I would heat up a couple pans, then wedge a straight pin (like for sewing) in a corner.  If the glue was hot enough, this was enough to lift up a corner.  Sometimes I was able to slide dental floss under the lifted corner.  More often than not, I'd get frustrated and have to repeat the process a few times before I could lift the pan up enough to get it out.  By the end, I broke off a tip of a craft knife in between a pan and the palette.  I regretted starting the process, I pictured myself ending up in the ER with a stupid depotting injury, and I wanted to give up many times.  Depotting Heavy Metals is not for the weak!

It was a slow process.  The glue is strong and the plastic is thick.  This was the single most difficult palette I have ever depotted.  I spent a couple hours on it one night, then gave up and finished in another hour the next day. 

Because I neglected to clean off the glue from my depotted Electric pans and they don't want to budge from my magnetic palette, I just went ahead and added Heavy Metals to that.  The shades aren't arranged in the greatest order.  The palette itself got dirty during the process.  I'm going to go on with my life though.

Urban Decay Electric and Heavy Metals palettes

Since I didn't completely destroy my Electric palette when I depotted it (remember, the tray holding the shadows just popped out), I decided to depot my BH Cosmetics Zodiac palette and glue the pans into the husk of Electric.  I love the Zodiac palette but the packaging is bulky and annoying to use.  Oh, this was a mistake.  I thought I'd just rip back the cardboard, pop the pans off it, and go.  False!  The pans are thin and flimsy and I mangled a few.  I had some of the shimmer shades jump ship.  I tried to repress them.  It looks fucking awful.  I used too much glue.  I didn't get my pans aligned properly.  I was frustrated because things were already breaking.  If you want to depot your Zodiac palette, be really careful to not bend the cardboard.  The pans will bend along with it!  Maybe applying heat would be a good idea.  Or a bad idea, because it's paper.  I can't say.  I kind of regret doing this though!  

The wreckage of my BH Cosmetics Zodiac palette, depotted and rehomed in the shell of UD Electric.

If I had it all to do over, I would still have depotted Snow White and Electric.  I would have been more careful with Zodiac.  And I would not even have purchased Heavy Metals.  Depotting Heavy Metals made me decide I am well and truly done with annoying packaging.  My hands are still sore as I write this!  I shouldn't have to put in this much effort to make my packaging work.  Makeup companies need to get their shit together.