pressing minerals with ez prez

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I had a day off today, so I decided to devote a part of it to pressing my mineral makeup, now that my order from Coastal Scents came! It’s my first time ever pressing pigments or minerals, so there was definitely a learning curve.

To learn how to press your own minerals, check out the Coastal Scents site, they have a very helpful video on what you need & how to do it.

The bottle that the EZ Prez came to me in totally sucks for making accurate droplets so I transferred a little bit of the solution into a dropper bottle I had lying around the house. Using an eyedropper would work just as fine.

EZ Prez Pressing Medium (image source: Coastal Scents)

And then I put some rubbing alcohol into an old body spray bottle that I had (the body spray was so old, I had no qualms in dumping it out) and used it as the alcohol spray. I didn’t have 91% alcohol like the video suggests, but 70% works just as well – you just need to wait a little more for it dry on the pan.

A picture of the final damage - this also shows all the tools I used.

Look at all those empty mineral sample jars!  It felt like a huge weight off of my chest just by getting rid of those jars.  If only EDM had a “Back-to-EDM” program like MAC did…I’d have so many freebies!  The comb was my “spatula”, and the Q-tip helped clean my mixing jar after I pressed each shade.  The piece of ribbon is for the hatch marks at the top, and the quarter is for even pressing.  Oh, and you DEFINITELY need to cover your desk with newspaper for this project.

The end product: 4 hours & a very sore thumb later.

FYI: One sample EDM jar nearly fills a full 26mm pan, but there is still room for a bit more.

Because I had some space to add more powder/minerals, for some of the shades, I mixed in my Makeup Masala mineral samples, as well as my Coastal Scents glitter powder in Crimson & Treasure Chest to differentiate between similar shades (ie. peach with gold flecks vs. peach with red flecks).  The bottom row are all sample blushes from EDM that I tried to make more “eyeshadow-y” by making them pop a little more with glitter.  The Coastal Scents glitter powder is extremely finely milled, and are cosmetic grade, so they don’t look tacky  - they’re hardly noticeable

You can see the differences in depth here.

One very important thing that I learned in this process is to not add too much EZ Prez pressing medium. If you do, not only will the pressing process be difficult because the powder is too tacky, but the shadow is too creamy (but not creamy enough to be a cream shadow) to give good colour payoff and be blendable. I find that the glittery shadows resisted becoming too tacky a lot better. The 2 matte colours that I did (first 2 pans in the middle row) ended up being very difficult to swatch & blend.

Row 1: Swatches correspond from Bottom to Top to L-R in palette

Row 2: Notice how the bottom 2 swatches (the mattes) have poor colour payoff.

Row 3: All fleshy, blush colours.

So that’s that – I will try and do a look with these colours very soon!  I finish off this post with some more photos that I proudly took of the finished palette =)

You can see the imprint that the design on the ribbon left in the front left pan, hehe.

You can faintly see it in the glittery purple one too!! I'm a very proud mama of this palette =D

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Tags: coastal scents, DIY, everyday minerals, ez prez, makeup masala, pigments, pressing minerals