My bathroom floor is hungry. Hungry for products which it likes to consume and kill on its cold tiled depths. I hate my bathroom floor, but I have decided that it's not getting the better of me any more.
Oh no siree.
It's devastated two products recently, the Balm's lovely Mary-Lou Manizer and an Inglot blusher in a deep coral shade (I think it's 32, the brand doesn't name its products and the number's rubbed off). I'll tackle the Balm highlighter another time but I reckoned I could fix the blusher easily enough, having read a few times online about what you need to do. And yeah, it's fairly simple, you just need to get organised and hunt for a few bits you may not have lying about the house.
Being unsure of the exact specifics and steps, I found this tutorial on Bubblegarm really helpful and so here's how I resurrected my blusher:
WHAT YOU'LL NEED
- your shattered product
- surgical spirit (I got mine at the chemist for a couple of euro)
- a teaspoon
- a freezer/sandwich bag
- a cloth (I used one of my muslin cleansing cloths but a clean J-Cloth would be fine)
- something with a flat base that fits inside the pot to tamp down the powder once you've done your fancy business - if it's shadow you can use a coin, I used a small pot of Make Up For Ever HD powder as it was the right size
AND HERE'S WHAT YOU DO
Firstly, put the blusher (or shadow) into the freezer bag and carefully, using your spoon break it up even further. Mine was in quite large chunks so I needed to pluverize it so that the surgical spirit could penetrate through the lot and 'stick' it back together. It looks like a whole hape of a mess right now. Take a deep breath.
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Now, take it back out of the bag (you can chuck that out now), and add your surgical spirit a couple of drops at a time. You don't want to soak the pan and have excess fluid floating about, but you do want there to be an even level of dampness across it so that everything dries and firms up evenly.
Working quickly enough, wrap your cloth around whatever it is you've decided to use as your stamper, and carefully but firmly press down into the pan of wet mush to tamp it down and smooth the surface. I moved the stamper about a few times to make sure I had an even surface. This also helps soak up any excess liquid in the pan so everything will dry quicker.
Finished ... but looking a little untidy
That's basically it - lots of people advise leaving the now firmly-pressed powder in the airing cupboard (or the bleedin' hot press, depending on how posh you are) overnight, to allow everything to properly dry out. I just left it on a shelf for a few hours until it felt nice and arid.
Tidied up and lookin' pretty darn good if I do say so meself
Any downsides to this? If you loathe the smell of surgical spirit avoid (I, on the other hand, love it), or if you find it irritates your skin then this might not be a goer for you. The reason it's used is because of its alcohol content - about 70%. That's what does the trick, so you can actually use high proof vodka for this too, or rubbing alcohol either.
Why alcohol is used I am not sure - the Curious George in me did a hunt and the best answer I can find is that it's sanitary. That alone is unlikely to be the real reason why it works - and if so it must be possible to fix broken powder with other mixing mediums (I know I've seen Optrex mentioned before) but hey, surgical spirit is cheap, so here we are!
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The other thing I've read is that this can change the texture of the product so it's not as nice as it was before - I've yet to see if that's the case. Watch this space.
