What is wrong with my makeup?! Have you hit HARD PAN?

It happens over time, until one day you look down at your makeup and it has a hard, shiny, patchy appearance. You aren't picking up much pigment on your brush. What do you do? Do you scrape that layer off? Do you toss it in the garbage?

The answer is NO!

Hard pan is the slow accumulation of oils from dirty brushes or even your fingers. Good thing, it is no big deal to fix (so you can swatch away without guilt of touching the pans with your naked fingers).

Hard pan in my Bobbi Brown Shimmer Brick

You see those patchy bits? It hasn't gone bad, and it's not a quality issue. This is just a highlighter I have kept coming back to swatch... and not use. It's basically only seen my grimey ol' fingers. (JK - I always wash my hands before playing with any makeup).

Then I grabbed some old fashioned tape. (Is there a name for this kind of tape? I call it Scotch tape, but I know that's a brand... Packing tape, masking tape, duct tape, electrical tape, I know the names of all kinds of other tapes...)

You just press the tape down into the pan, and lift up. Keep going until all the hard pan patches are gone. It doesn't take that many passes of tape.

GOOD BYE HARD PAN

You can see the hard pan patches stuck to the tape.

I probably didn't need to go through this much tape because after a point you're just take the top layer of powder off. But I wanted my compact to look pristine.

Hard Pan Gone!

Ta da!!! Good as new!