We’ve all bought an eyeshadow palette for just two or three shades, leaving the rest untouched. For Saumya Melwani, founder of Inside Août, this familiar frustration became the starting point for a different approach to makeup. “A palette is personal. If you’re the one who’ll use it every day, you should be the one who decides what’s in it.”
Inside Août’s customisable eyeshadow palettes arrive empty, with individually packaged shades that customers can arrange, swap and refill as they please. “I wanted it to feel like something you made rather than something you bought,” she explains. The idea is to create a palette that fits into your everyday routine and changes with your preferences, rather than having to work around a selection someone else has made.
Behind that freedom is careful curation. The brand spent more than a year developing and refining its collection of 24 eyeshadow shades, spanning warm and cool tones, mattes and metallics. The brand prioritised pigment, blendability and wear, even cutting colours that looked beautiful but didn’t perform as expected. The final selection of seven mattes and seventeen metallics reflects that attention to detail.
Personalisation, however, doesn’t mean compromising on the brand’s own perspective. “The choice is in what you put together. The point of view is in what there is to choose from.” Inside Août creates the colours and textures, but leaves their interpretation to the customer. As the founder puts it, “We give you the tools, but your self-expression is entirely yours.”
Rather than offering another version of the perfect palette, Inside Août lets you decide what yours looks like.