It’s really fun to put together colors you love and will wear in an order that makes sense to you, but it can be daunting if you are starting from scratch or haven’t dialed-in on what you like best. It can be quite expensive buying singles to fill up a palette, too!
— Christine
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I only tried it once, with a 4-shade empty palette I got from Urban Decay. I kept switching out the shades so often I finally gave up. Now I use a Darice 32-compartment plastic organizer for all of my singles (MAC, UD, and CP), and I organized the shades by brand, then color. So it sort of serves as a big palette, though none of the pans are depotted. This I like very much.
I’ve had a lot of fun putting together MAC, ColourPop, and a few indie singles into my own customized palettes. Love that I get to choose the exact shades that I know I’ll use!
Or so I thought….I still tend to grab for a premade palette most often, unfortunately. Mostly out of either laziness or being in a hurry. Makes me feel quite guilty about having spent so much time, energy and money on the single pans that I did.
I love making palettes because you can make them whatever size you want with whatever formulas you like and with your own inspiration. The only challenge is finding affordable empty palettes that I like, as the selection is pretty limited.
Especially for travel, I like to be able to choose the shadows I want to take with me to keep things streamlined. Even for storage, I find palettes easier than singles which is why I like being able to get shadows in pro pans or at least in single containers that are easy to remove (Sephora’s are like this). But I don’t have a lot of imagination and so tend to buy the same sorts of colours over and over again and, as a result, don’t have a lot of variety in the shadows I purchase as singles. That is the “up side” of pre-made quads, 5-pans and bigger palettes – they provide me with shadows that aren’t taupe, brown, bronzey brown, greeny brown or browny green or…taupe.
Z-palettes were a game changer for me and there are more and more companies out there putting out really great quality and affordable singles. The ability to curate my own favorites in a way that makes the most sense for me has dramatically increased my eyeshadow game and moved me past the two-shade (one all over, one lid) look and lets me take chances on a color that’s outside of my norm. A palette like Norvina 3 is never making it into my cart, but I’m way more likely be inspired by the color story in a palette my own way, look at reviews of singles, and find a teal or mint green that I think works best for me and drop $5-7 on something I researched rather than feeling like I’m only getting use out of 33-66% of a palette either because of the colors in the palette or internal inconsistencies where some of the shades just turn out to be duds.
The thing that can be a bummer is a) loving too much that multiple palettes may be necessary, and b) trying to reconfigure where to put new shades in a way that makes sense. Maybe that’s just me though because I usually take advantage of sales so I’m usually buying a dozen or more at a time picking up some things that I’ve had my eye on or a color I might not take a chance on for full-price. So it’s usually not just sneaking in one or two colors – it’s a full out remodeling of palettes a few times a year.
At this point I only own a custom made palette with 15 eyeshadows and it works great for me, I have sufficient neutrals and a couple of pops of color that I don’t feel limited. I like it for various reasons:
* the creative process of choosing the colors and putting everything together
* how compact and easy to store and travel with is
* cost effective on the long run, even if the upfront cost is higher
* less waste in the environment, the custom palette lasts years, and if I buy MAC singles I can recycle the metal pan and the paper envelope it comes in (theoretically)
* I can easily replace the shades I actually finish or use more often
The price for sure, some brands don’t offer competitively priced singles so I tend to skip over them even if they make my first choice for a certain color. It quickly becomes basically luxury brand expensive if you have to pay full shipping on, say, two $20 singles from UD that you still have to depot on top of whatever else you want in the palette. Then it REALLY starts to feel like a waste of money if you’re stuck with different pan shapes and sizes spoiling the sleekness and uniformity of your now pricey DIY palette. It disappoints me just imagining finding the perfect color but in a rectangle pan. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m serious—a big part of the thrill of a palette is how neat it looks. In general, mixing and matching across brands for a palette is more complicated and expensive and lacks the instant gratification of a ready made palette. I think it’s brilliant that brands like Sydney Grace are offering such well priced, incredibly nuanced singles to address those downsides. Plus you can get the colors all at once because you’re just buying from one brand that built their business model specifically for custom palettes.
No wasted colors. Choose for well-reviewed performance. Feels painterly to re/arrange. See more clearly what I have so less likely to buy more iterations of same. (gee, I guess 4 shades of slightly different yellows are enough).
Awesome insight, I definitely experience all of this!!
I have never tried making my own palette and judging from the comments I have read over the years here, sometimes extracting the eyeshadows out of a pre made one can be very tricky.
I do need to get an empty z palette type of thing – they are not easily available here in Melbourne to put my SG singles in and I think then that I would use them.
I think having the single shades you love vs buying a pre made palette that contains only half the shades you would use works out to be better value.
LIKE: Putting my own palettes together is not my favorite thing, and I don’t do it often. However, I like the idea that there will only be colors that I need and/or want, love, and will use. It’s fun if I have a goal in mind when buying. I like that once singles are bought, I can take shades from different brands, put them in a magnetic palette, and use that combination for as long as I like. I find that particularly handy for traveling: I’ll sometimes take a basic neutrals palette, and then make a little palette of colors to go with my outfits, or take a brights palette and make a little palette of perfect crease, deepening (no black!), inner corner, and brow bone highlighting shades to augment it. That’s so much easier than taking a few pre-made palettes just to have a few colors to suit different outfits or occasions.
DISLIKE: It can be overwhelming to chose shades, especially if I don’t have a defined color story or goal worked out ahead of time, or it’s my first time buying singles from a particular brand. It’s very frustrating when shades I want are constantly out of stock. I run the risk of choosing my same old favorite types of shades rather than what my collection actually needs. It can be hard to keep it cohesive, as I want to grab all the pretty or quirky shades, but they may not all work together really well. As Christine said, it can get pretty expensive, too.
Hate is a strong word… but do not like buying singles.
It’s had to compile, IMO.
If someone made it easier, like a drag and drop into a virtual palette, I might enjoy that–also so I can really see what I’m getting, or am I buying colours so similar (which I tend to) it’s a waste of money?
I have several 6pan MUFE palettes which I really like, and I can fill them with the odds I do have, I guess I could travel with them easily, but they don’t carry all the colours I want, and a lot of time I cannot depot my fave colours from other palettes to take with me.
Additionally, when I buy a prepared palette there might be a colour or two in there I would never buy, but once I own the palette, I might give it a try.
Check out Lethal Cosmetics. They have a virtual palette exactly as you describe. Their quality is excellent, too.
I’m on my second iteration of DIY palettes. When I first started getting into makeup again, I bought MUG shadows and empty palettes and found that I didn’t like them at all. I think it was because I didn’t know yet what colors or formulas worked for me so ended up preferring pre-made palettes.
Then, last year or the year before, after a few years of using mostly pre-made palettes as well as several standalone colors needed, and seeing how well SG was performing, I decided to try making my own palettes again. This time, my intention was to find several good matte shades for dealing with deep set eyes and transition, so I bought various SG shades to find ones to fulfill just that requirement. Once I found those shades, I used an empty MUFE palette to store these deep-set and transition shades, and labeled the top of the palette so I’d know that was the one to pull out for this.
Then I decided that I wanted to dive further into SG, looking for shades that seemed to be missing from my pre-made palettes. So I ordered maybe 25 shades of varying hues but in mostly shimmer shades and put them all together into a large Z palette until I had chance to try each shade. When trying each shade, I noted where the shade worked best on the eye.
At that point, I was wondering how I would know which shade was good for just the lid, or just the inner lid, or just the outer lid/crease, as sometimes I couldn’t tell by just looking and didn’t want to have to pull out notes each time to figure it out. That’s when I decided that I’d use my various sized empty magnetic MUFE palettes to make palettes based on where the shade would be used. Since the largest MUFE palette holds just 6 shades, this meant having several small palettes instead of one large Z palette, but having less choice in a palette is more appealing to me.
So I made palettes based on inner lid only, outer lid/crease only, middle lid only (meaning I need to have other shades to mellow out that middle shade), and all-over-lid shades. I made labels for the lid of each palette that shows where the palette is applied, as well as smaller labels with part of the color name as organized in the palette.
This allows me to pull out a palette based on whatever I need, then fill in with other palettes as needed. It sounds complicated but organizing based on the best place to wear the shade makes it much easier to pull together a look and in traveling. Sometimes I choose my middle or all-over-lid shade first and then choose the others based on that shade.
So impressed with your insight. I want to try and do this too for my collections. Makes a lot of sense, and I really appreciate your input.
Thanks Rhonda. When I first thought of doing it, it seemed to be such a silly way to organize them. But then once I did it, what a difference. I forgot to add that within each palette, I do organize similar colors together and/or from light to dark to satisfy my eye too.
I don’t like ones provided by companies. I just make my own.
What I like about my own are being able to swap out what I take when I travel and mixing different palettes together. Also, when I depot palettes, I often end up finding I have duplicate shades I’m not going to use, so I make little palettes to send friends with shades I think they’ll like.
Like: That I did it. ;). And that colors are organized.
Don’t like: The time it takes, as I have to put a lot of thought into it.