Finally, There's a Kit to Repair Smashed Makeup Palettes
The sound of a makeup palette hitting the floor is essentially the beauty version of seeing a car crash in slow motion. I can rattle off a list of beloved compacts I've lost thanks to butter fingers — Becca's Sunlit Bronzer, St. Tropez's 3-in-1 Bronzing Powder — apparently the universe is trying to tell me I wear too much bronzer. Then there are the shadow palettes that have gotten crushed at the bottom of purses and the burst blushes in luggage that have turned my entire wardrobe dusty pink.
The lost makeup is bad enough, but then there's a decision to make: Do you buy a new compact? Or, like me, do you keep using your broken-ass old favorite (or Frankensteined back together), throwing loose powder all over yourself and your face in the process?
Like the savior I never knew I needed, the Fixy Makeup Repair kit landed in my inbox. Each $44 kit contains everything you need to salvage the bits of a broken pressed powder, spray it with a bonding agent, and repackage it to be as good as new. If it worked, I figured, I'd save us all a lot of time cleaning up spilled makeup. And if it didn't work, it still reminded me of my childhood rock polishing kit — a win-win. I put Fixy to the test, and here's how my beauty surgery worked out.
1. Set up your operating room
Each Fixy kit comes with a grinder tool, a pressing device, a pick/scraper, and a binding agent. There are also nine empty pans (three each of eye shadow, blush, and bronzer) — well worth the $44 compared to re-buying nine broken products. Finally, there's a magnetized z-palette to stash your new pans in. Think of it like the afterlife, a place where all your busted makeup can get a second chance.
2. If it ain't broke…break it
OK, in reality, you'll be working with makeup that's been accidentally broken. But in my beauty lab/apartment floor, I used a knife to slice up this eye shadow. It. Felt. Fantastic. (Now I know how this woman feels, guillotine'ing lipsticks.)
3. Gather the carnage
Dump your busted powder into the screen. If it's just loose and not completely broken, use the teeny pick and scraper tools included in the kit to scrape every last bit of makeup out of the old packaging and into the screened section.
4. Grind it all to a powder
Use the grinding tool to break up any clumps and get the makeup back to its powdery consistency. The grinder pushes all the makeup through the screen into a catch-all tin below.
5. Choose your pan, spritz, and press
Pick a pan and pour your makeup in. Try to gauge the size of your old packaging compared to the three new tin sizes to choose from. I started off with a medium-sized pan, then quickly realized I didn't have enough leftover shadow to fill it completely. No big deal — I just started the step again and poured into the smaller pan the second time around. Then find the press tool that corresponds to the size of your pan. I spritzed two pumps of the binding agent onto the powder, then held the presser in place for 10 seconds.
No drying time needed, just snap your new pan into place in the magnetized tin and, boom, you're done. The kit fully saved my murdered eye shadow; I just wish it could exorcize my bathroom from the ghosts of palettes past.
If you have a big makeup collection, or plan to break at least two items of makeup over the course of pretty much your entire life, the kit is well worth the $44 — call it makeup klutz insurance. Even if you're not a klutz and just have a lot of powder makeup, you can smash and mix powders together to create your own powder pan pigments. Think of the possibilities. Plus, these simples steps are strangely therapeutic, like the beauty version of woodworking. It feels so good to create something other than a cat eye with my hands that I'm almost excited for the next time I hear the dreaded sound of compact hitting tile. Almost.
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