I have amassed quite the collection of 1/4 teaspoon sample bags from Shiro Cosmetics, so the time has come to start pressing some of them!

TheBodyNeeds2.com sells a ‘pressing kit‘ which is inexpensive (USD $9.95 + $5.95 shipping to Australia), and easy to work with. They enclose ‘pressing medium’ instead of alcohol with the kit, which produces a better pressed shadow.

The pressing kit contains pressing medium, 10 pans, 2 spatulas, one tamper, and 10 magnets.

So the first thing you will need is a tiny mixing bowl. I grabbed a 1 teaspoon measure from the kitchen:

Then grab your shadow:

Empty into the bowl:

Add 10 drops of pressing medium, then stir:

Then add another 10 drops of pressing medium, then stir again. The shadow and pressing medium can be hard to combine, so try smooshing it against the side of the bowl to make sure there are no lumps and everything combines properly. You need a consistency like that of cake mixture. If you don’t have that, keep adding drops of pressing medium (two at a time) until you do:

Once you have your cake mixture consistency, put it into the pan and push it around with the spatula until you have a relatively even layer:

Then split the two layers of a paper towel in half, place over the shadow, and stamp the whole thing down quite hard. Repeat this until the paper towel comes away more or less dry and the surface is even:

The shadow should look something like the one below. Once you’ve set it aside, wipe over your bowl and spatula with a paper towel and do the next one.

Place on a paper towel to dry for 24 – 48 hours:

Pressing these shadows gives me a new-found appreciation for Shiro Cosmetics shadows:



Then clean up the enormous mess you made!

You can see that these pans are not as tall as the MAC ones, but they suit the 1/4 teaspoon sample bags really well. In fact, they only fill up the pans half way, so you could fit more in the pans if you have full-sized Shiro shadows:



When placed into my MAC Pro Palette, you can see that The Body Needs pans are more or less the same width as the MAC ones.



But they are not as tall. They sit as firmly in the palette as all the others though.

Once the shadows are dry, peel off the backing on the magnets and attach them to the back of the pan. You can see that they’re a little big:

So I chopped off the corners:

My orginal idea was to glue the little labels to the back of them, but it turns that the paper is too thick for the magnets to work.

So I resorted to masking tape and a pen:

This is the Etsy palette I bought to house them. I bought it from anothersoul for USD $12.99 plus $9 shipping to Australia. She sells a range of Eco-Friendly Magnetic Freedom Palettes like this one. All of them are made with a strong magnet at the base of the palette and hand made by the owner, then covered in paper.They look even better in real life than they do in the photos, and each palette is unique:

This palette would fit 15 of The Body Needs pans, or 15 MAC pans:

Even though the MAC pans are taller, the palette would still close if it contained MAC pans:



Shiro Cosmetics eyeshadows swatched after pressing.

Still iridescent and beautiful 🙂

If you have Shiro Cosmetics sample bags lying around, I’d strongly encourage you to press some of them. It means that you can apply them more quickly and still take advantage of the gorgeous range of colours they have.