How do you organize your eyeshadow singles?
I organize by brand! If the brand has enough eyeshadows, and I am diligent, then I also organize by finish (matte vs. shimmer) and then in rainbow-color order.
— Christine
Explore Temptalia
We're here to help you make better beauty purchases that you'll enjoy and love! We recommend signing up to take advantage of personalized features like tracking products you own, viewing dupes that you already have, and more!
Here are some useful resources for you:
Compare Any Two
Curious how two shades compare to each other? Type in the shades below to get instant side-by-side swatches!
22 Comments
Comments that do not adhere to our comment policy may be removed. Discussion and debate are highly encouraged but we expect community members to participate respectfully. Please keep discussion on-topic, and if you have general feedback, a product review request, an off-topic question, or need technical support, please contact us!
Please help us streamline the comments' section and be more efficient: double-check the post above for more basic information like pricing, availability, and so on to make sure your question wasn't answered already. Comments alerting us to typos or small errors in the post are appreciated (!) but will typically be removed after errors are fixed (unless a response is needed).
We appreciate enthusiasm for new releases but ask readers to please hold questions regarding if/when a review will be posted as we can't commit to or guarantee product reviews. We don't want to set expectations and then disappoint readers as even products that are swatched don't always end up being reviewed due to time constraints and changes in priorities! Thank you for understanding!
Comments on this post are closed.
We try to approve comments within 24 hours (and reply to them within 72 hours) but can sometimes get behind and appreciate your patience! 🙂 If you have general feedback, product review requests, off-topic questions, or need technical support, please contact us directly. Thank you for your patience!
I have Sydney Grace, ABH, and a handful of Clionadh singles remaining in my stash. I do not arrange by finish, but rainbow fashion for sure.
4 giant Adept palettes: (1) mattes, (2) shimmers and then Colourpop small pan (3) mattes and (4) shimmers depotted from a slew of their 12-pan and 9-pan palettes.
I’m on your train, but still might get other adepts and give the Zs away. One for CP, one for SG (with more greens than all of Massachusetts needs), one for Viseart, and one for grays/taupes/ cool light browns. For home storage, nothing beats their ability to consolidate. Sturdy, but too heavy for some.
I’m pretty similar to both of you. I’m also in the process of replacing Zs with Adepts.
Color and formula. The singles I like and would use on a more regular basis are kept together. Colors I rarely reach for or formulas that are kinda poop but for some reason I can’t part with are in a palette at the back of the drawer.
They’re supposed to be organized? Crap, now you tell me.
I just put them in whatever empty palette I have at the time, which is probably why I almost never wear them because there’s no rhyme or reason.
By color! I have 5 magnetic palettes for de-potted/”pro-pan” singles and an acrylic tray for loose powder/cream/baked shadows.
Magnetic palettes are (1) blues, teal, silver, white (2) gold/copper, orange, yellow, greens (3) pinks, mauve (4) purples, berry, burgundy, red (5) brown/beige, taupe, gray, black. Acrylic tray is in rainbow order with black/gray at the end.
I have mostly MAC singles and cannot figure out how to depot without breaking them. Otherwise I would organize in a Z palette by color order.
There are depotting videos on you tube. I depotted my MAC singles years ago, I remember starting with the one I liked the least. It was scary though.
Do not be scared! Depotting is so fun. I have a kit. I use a soldering iron, very thin magnets, a small screwdriver.
With the screwdriver pop the plastic pan out of the compact. Push through the back of the plastic pan & the metal pan drops out (NEVER force it! If it doesn’t drop out, heat it again.)
I like to use the original label, so I wrap a piece of foil over my flat iron, set the compact on that for a few seconds & the label lifts off.
I stick a magnet on the metal pan. Stick the label on that.
Done!
Random singles are sorted by color into matching colored magnetic palettes. Larger collections from a single brand are put together in a magnetic palette and arranged by color. Singles in packaging that I couldn’t depot are in sorted by brand in labeled boxes.
Loose shadows are sorted by color in small, clear, labeled boxes.
I have a dual sided custom made MAC palette, and half of it is an 15 eyeshadow pan. It’s all that I have and more than enough. I actually have the palette for 5-6 years, and I’m surprised how good it still looks.
I have many large Adept palettes that are organized by color. I separated out matte brown/crease shades. I have another Adept palette where I shop my stash and pull out some from each color family to use.
I do them by color, too…except… there’s a column of SG mid tone mattes for transition and crease. Since they are close to one another both in shade and location, it’s easy to see which one leans toward which color family, like Thunderbird for blues/slates, etc. Makes it so easy for a standard, non-editorial look.
Rainbow style! For me it’s just easier to keep everything in a gradient of color and tones of shades.
I use mostly dual-sided Adept palettes; the 70-pan ones are my favorites. I try to keep them organized as follows:
1. 70-pan Adept: Neutral-ish mattes I’m most likely to use, warmer on one side, cooler on the other, organized in a combination of light to dark and colour families
2. 70-pan Adept: Inner corner highlights in lots of shades, then other favorite shimmers/metallics in roughly rainbow order
3. A large Sydney Grace palette, usually empty but it’s for traveling or for keeping new shades separate before I add them in to my main organization. If I went somewhere I’d be likely to take 1 and 2 above, plus pull some colorful mattes and other things into this palette from the ones listed below.
4. 70-pan Adept: Colour pop depotted palettes with the smaller-size pans, rainbow order, mattes on one side, shimmers/metallics on the other
5. Two of the 95-pan Adept dual-sided palettes with space for most of my standard-sized shimmers and metallics–I move things between this and #2 above depending on what kinds of looks I’m doing most often
6. One of the huge Adept single-sided palettes–I think it’s also around 95 pan? With more colorful standard-sized mattes, plus neutral mattes that aren’t in #1 above.
7. Older Make Up For Ever large palette, large Z-palette, and Colour Pop palettes for odd-sized pans (Old MUFE, Nabla, etc.) and for older pans I’m really unlikely to use but can’t bring myself to throw away
8. A tiny MUFE palette in my purse with eight little Colour Pop shades that can give me a warm neutral and a cooler neutral look. I think mostly from the Bare Necessities palette.
I keep the singles that have their own containers in my everyday makeup bag (so that I can find them when I need them) and the other singles in a magnetic box. I don’t really organise them in a particular way though.
I organize by brand and then by rainbow color order as well. I don’t worry about the finish when I organize them. The ones I can’t depot or are scared to, I keep in the smaller three tiered drawer storage bins by brand. I am glad others share a flare for organizing eyeshadows, LOL!!!
I organize by brand. I have mostly MAC singles and I need to sit down and re-organize them as I have added to the collection and just put new ones by themselves. Organizing eyeshadows are fun, I think. Other brands I have organized just by brand as I don’t have many eyeshadows from any other brand. I try to organize by finish and then colour.
I can only wear MAC eyeshadow because my eyes are sensitive. I have 22. I buy them still in the black single case. I hate palettes because of kickback. I put mine in ice cube trays with a tiny printed out name tag right next to the shadow. This has been working for 18 years.
The ones with a case have their own drawer in my storage towers but beyond that it’s a free for all. At least I don’t have that many so what I’m looking for isn’t hard to find. The others that are just in the pot are in a giant magnetic palette, but again there’s no real organization going on there either, honestly.