little white truths

Hello and welcome to my post on what I'm calling 'the Needle Method', which is something I've been doing to help me pan powders: it not only helps me pan them faster, but it has other benefits that I'll touch on below.

As you may know, I first started separating the components of my Hourglass Ambient Lighting Blush Palette last year when I was focusing on it via Project Dent, because I realised that I not only had three blush shades in the palette: I also had highlighters and finishing powders, provided I could focus my brush in the pale swirls of each pan - which I could do for a while with a small liner/brow brush in Incandescent Electra because the pearl swirls were wider - but that became too hard eventually and I also couldn't do it with the other two shades.

So I thought, why don't I use a sewing needle or pin? Off I went and found a needle, and the rest is history...

So you can see there's been some good movement in only one month, and it's not as though I'm wasting my powders in the Needle Method process because I don't over-apply them (Why would I? I love this palette and it didn't come cheap!) - and I also never waste a drop because I'm not a 'tap off the excess into the air' kind of girl. 

On that, why do people do the 'tap off the excess' thing - especially with expensive makeup?! Oh the waste of it... I've never understood that one so feel free to enlighten me in the comments. I rarely get excess on my brush in the first place because I'm gentle with my powders, or if I do (or if I dislodge too much via the Needle Method), then I just tap said excess back into the pan and use it next time. Am I crazy? Well yes. But maybe not for that reason. Or maybe I'm just really bad at makeup...

I digress. Let's talk about my Needle Method.

* Image courtesy of unsplash.com

The Needle Method:

That's the Needle Method.

But wait, wait, there's more to say...

This little Burberry quad (also part of my Pan that Palette challenge) has been something of a nightmare to use - until I started applying the Needle Method to it too.

Here's how it looked one month ago:

And here's how it's looking now:

The reason why it's been a nightmare to use is because the palest shade has zero pigment, the 'green' is a muddy grey in practice (and it also has rubbish pigment), and the dark brown is ok but it's too dark and not cool enough for me to use as a brow colour on my already forest-like brows. So I need to mix those shades (whether together or with other shadows) to get them to work for me.

However. You know how mixing shadows is fraught with hazard because you can't always get the exact same colour on both eyes/brows when you're going between two pans? (Or maybe that's just me because I'm a big spanner.)

Enter the Needle Method.

What I've been doing is scraping a little of the pale shade out with my needle and then scraping out a little of whatever shade I'm wearing for the day from my custom palette (below). Crush, mix, apply. The shades on my eyes are now always the same. 

So are my brow shades. I'm using the 'fake green' and brown for my brows, and while before I was occasionally mixing my brow colour too dark, now that I'm crushing my powders and mixing them before application (sometimes swatching them first to check the shade), my brows are looking how I want them to every day. Huzzah!

I've also been applying the Needle Method to my Clarins bronzer. Here's how it looked last month:

And here's how it's looking now:

Yes I've still been using this as my body bronzer in the usual fashion, but I've also been crushing and mixing bits from the centre to lighten the dark shade from my Burberry quad. Reason being, I don't like going too dark on the outer v for my everyday eye looks - so I've been using the Needle Method to crush/mix the bronzer with the Burberry brown to get an outer v colour that's more my speed.

While I don't have a highlighter to show you at the moment (I will soon, so stay tuned), I've been using the Needle Method for that too with a highlighter I'm panning outside my current projects. It works beautifully to make a shimmery lid shade from any matte shadow I'm panning (eg the dusty rose in the Burberry quad), and it also allows me to adapt a stock-standard champagne highlighter by eg adding some of Luminous Flush from the Hourglass palette so I can wear something different on the high-points of my face for the day - while still using the powders I'm panning. This of course helps with boredom and panning-fatigue!

* Image courtesy of unsplash.com

Why does the Needle Method pan powders faster?

Honestly, I don't know. But I'm panning powders faster than I ever have, and as mentioned above, it's not as though I'm over-applying them or wasting the excess. Eg, if I accidentally crush/mix more shadow than I need, I just save the mix for the next day by sweeping it into one of the Burberry pans.

I wonder, though, whether some of the powder is adhering to my desk when I crush/mix - so perhaps that's why I'm moving through things more quickly? I also think that crushing powders is akin to re-pressing them, which always helps to pan powders faster - especially when it comes to tightly packed mattes.

I should also say that it may depend on the powders in question. The green and pale bronze Burberry shadows aren't pigmented so I do need to use more than I normally would to get them to show up (same goes with the Clarins bronzer), and although the Hourglass blushes are super pigmented on the cheeks, you do need to build them on the eyes (whether you're using the coloured portions of the pans or the pearls), and I also need to build the pearls when I use them as facial highlighters - so I think that helps to speed things along.

Having said this, I'm using the Needle Method on powders in my custom palette that are super pigmented - and they're still moving faster than I would expect. So there's something about the needle process that just works. I can't explain it: it must be some kind of magical panning witchery ; )

* Image courtesy of unsplash.com

In a nutshell: benefits of the Needle Method 

The Needle Method helps to:

• pan powders faster, which of course helps with motivation because you're seeing progress more quickly
• pan BLUSHES faster (the hardest thing to pan, in my experience) because you can dislodge little bits of blush along with highlighters/shimmer shades, crush/mix those and use them as coloured highlighters and/or shimmery lid shades 
• ensure you're getting the same shades for both sides of your face (cheeks, eyes, brows etc) because you're mixing shades together first, rather than sweeping your brush across separate pans and hoping for the best
• encourage you to mix shades that you mightn't otherwise have mixed (potentially creating new mixes that you love), because if you're anything like me, you'll start dislodging/crushing everything you can get your hands on: it's exciting and fun!
• 'increase' the pigment of low-pigment shades or powders that are losing pigment with age, because you're essentially turning them into loose powders - so they naturally apply with more punch
• encourage you to find ways to use powders that you don't love/wouldn't normally use much: eg the dark brown from the Burberry quad, which I've been able to turn into a paler shade via the Needle Method by mixing it with the Clarins bronzer (see above).