One Week, One Palette: Custom MAC, Makeup Geek, Make Up For Ever, and Morphe Palette

This is a project that I've wanted to start for a long time but never actually took the plunge. And that is a one week, one palette challenge. 

The general idea is that I will use one of my palettes for a week, pulling in other shadows as needed, and do a different look each day. 

I have a significant number of eyeshadow palettes, and I would like to make sure that I am not only rotating through all of them, but that I am also not doing the same look each time I use them. 

To start, I wanted to use one of my favorite but least used palettes, my custom palette. This has MAC, Makeup Geek (MUF), and Anastasia Beverly Hills (ABH) single shadows as well as depotted shadows from the Make Up For Ever (MUFE) Artist Palette Volume 1 and the Morphe 35T palette. 

My custom palette is a doubled-sided MAC palette with inserts. It holds 30 shadows.

I am not a fan on the look of Z-Palettes, especially with circle pans, as they don't look as uniform as I would like. Also (as you can tell), I am very messy with my shadows, and the mess was amplified within the Z-Palettes. I therefore ditched all my Z-Palettes and decided to go with the MAC palette with inserts. 

The palette is very heavy and will only magnetize MAC shadows, so magnets were needed with all the other shadows. 

The Morphe shadows in this palette (depotted from the 35T) do not have names, so I have just listed them numerically in my palette. 

The shadows are:

Top, from left: MUFE Golden Beige, MUG Cosmopolitan, MUG Mai Tai, Morphe 35T shadow 1, MUG Typhoon

Middle: MUG Grandstand, MUG Flamethrower, Morphe 35T shadow 2, Morphe 35T shadow 3, Morphe 35T shadow 4

Bottom: MUG Phantom, MUG Masquerade, MUG Caitlin Rose, Morphe 35T shadow 5, Morphe 35T shadow 6

Top, from left: MUG Peach Smoothie, MUG Creme Brule, MUG Cupcake, MUG Cocoa Bear, MUG Bitten

Middle: MAC Amber Lights, MAC Cranberry, MAC Woodwinked, MAC Coppering, Morphe 35T shadow 7

Bottom: ABH Pink Champagne, MUFE Taupe Platinum, MUFE Pink Granite, MUFE Iced Brown, MUFE Celestial Earth

Twenty-five of the shadows in here have a shimmer or metallic finish, and five have matte finishes. 

Below are five of the looks I did last week. Please note: this was my first time ever attempting to take pictures of my eye or my eye makeup. Please bear with me as I learn my camera and lighting more and can take better pictures.  

Please also note: I used MUFE Pearl on the inner corner and Kat Von D Laetus (from Shade and Light Eye) on my brow bone every day. 

Look 1:

Morphe 35T shadow 7 on lid, MUG Cupcake and MUG Peach Smoothie blended in the crease, and MUG Bitten lightly blended in the outer corner and into the crease. Morphe shadow 7 on the lower lash line. 

Look 2:

MAC Coppering on the lid, MUG Creme Brule and MUG Cocoa Bear blended in the crease, and MUG Bitten blended in the outer corner and into the crease. MUG Bitten on the lower lash line. 

Look 3:

MAC Cranberry on the lid, MUG Cupcake in the crease, and MUG Bitten blended on the outer corner and blended into the crease. MAC Cranberry on the lower lash line. 

Look 4:

Morphe shadow 2 on the lid, MUG Peach Smoothie, MUG Creme Brule, and MUG Cocoa Bear blended into the crease, and MUFE Celestial Earth padded onto the outer corner. Morphe shadow 2 and MUFE Celestial Earth on the lower lash line. 

Look 5:

MUG Flamethrower on the lid, MUG Creme Brule and MUG Cocoa Bear blended in the crease, and MUG Bitten blended on the outer corner and into the crease. MUG Bitten on the lower lash line.

I absolutely loved using this palette all week. I'm actually pretty bummed to have to move onto another palette this week, and I'll be using one of my favorites. 

Since my custom palette has so few matte shadows, my crease options were not all that varied, but I was very okay with that. I was surprised to find that I did two berry and two orange looks throughout the week, but I think those colors pair so nicely with Makeup Geek Bitten, which is one of my all-time favorite eyeshadows. 

My custom palette was easily my least used in my entire collection, and that always made me sad because I knew all the colors in there were incredible. And they are. I think since the palette is so big and heavy, it was a deterrent for me as my other palettes are generally easier to grab for. 

I also get into a strange "rut" if you will of using one palette one day and then moving on to something else the next day just so I always use something new. But doing that has never really allowed me to really fall for a palette the way I have my custom palette this week. 

And this should be a palette I fall for—absolutely—as I have chosen each shadow in it. In a lot of ways, I feel like this palette is close to everything I could ever need. It's very warm-toned, which I love, and is filled with berry, bronze, and orange shades that really complement my skin tone and eye color. 

Getting to use this palette all week really did curb any craving I've had for new eyeshadow palettes that are being launched seemingly daily. I have only chosen shadows of exceptional quality in my custom palette, so seeing palettes lack pigmentation and that are difficult to blend really doesn't excite me. 

I couldn't be more thrilled to have started this project and see where it goes from here. Maybe I'll even find some palettes that I'm able to declutter? More than anything, I'm excited to get to spend time falling for things already in my collection instead of being lured in by something new.