Day One – Colorant Choices
Day Two – Ingredient Choices
Once you have all of your ingredients assembled, it’s time to start designing your perfect color. There is no easy way to do this. Designing the perfect color is a process of trial and error. Thankfully, so long as your recipe contains no butters, you can melt, remelt and melt over and over with no damage to the balm.
Some basic rules of thumb:
If you want an opaque matte look, keep the titanium dioxide close by.
If you want a sheer look, stay away from titanium dioxide and use oxides sparingly.
This is Merlot Mica with titanium dioxide (left) and without (right). Both are very different look on the lips. Notice also the air bubbles in the titanium dioxide lipstick on the left? This is easily solved with a hit of the heat gun. A heat gun can be purchased in the hardware store in the paint stripping section.
This photo shows the power of brown. The container on the right is brown oxide addition. It has great coverage. It’s an opaque color, and a little goes a long way. Notice that the brown opacity really tones down the shimmer in the lipstick.
To get this color, I used a lot of Pearly White (what’s “a lot?” Well, as you can see from the top photo on yesterday’s post, coloring is almost a 1:1 ratio with the lip balm. There is at least 1 tsp of Pearly White in this 2 ounces of balm) and Merlot Mica and Cellini Red Mica to achieve this color. The Merlot Mica and Cellini Red were 1/2 tsp additions each.
I’ll be traveling to and from Portland tonight and Saturday for the “Portland Soapers Unite!” luncheon and will finish the lipstick tutorial next week. In the meantime, expect photos from the luncheon (including best and worst soap contest winners!), random soapy posts and cupcake shopping galore.
Hello,
I’m a first year college sophomore and I have been so research about the business of lipstick. I must say it is confusing, but this site really broke things down for me! Thank you:)
Q. I’m looking to make and sell lipstick. Would I be able to use the Bramble Berry’s Lipstick Kit or any of the lip safe colorants from this site w/o getting into “trouble” I guess my question is, if I purchase individual pigments from this site, are they batch certified colors? If not where do I began to get colors?
Great job with all the research! You definitely have a fun business idea. Yes, they are batch certified colors.
As long as the colorants that you are using (this goes for pigments or micas) are considered lip safe, yes, they can go into lipstick and balms. =)
Hi!!
I'm new on your blog, and I have a question. Can I use the pigments in both, lipstick and lip balm?
thaks.
I would definitely start with this sample pack:
https://www.brambleberry.com/Lip-safe-Colorants-Sample-Pack-1-sampler-pack-P3448.aspx
And if you want a bright cherry red, the red mica should definitely help get you there =)
Yes, you could remelt the lipstick you make – no problem there =)
I'm brand new to making my own cosmetics and was wondering what would be a good base set of colors to buy? Also I'm interested in making a bright cherry red lipstick, if I make a liptstick I don't like can I remelt it and play with the color to try to get what I want? Thank you so much! Love your blog!!!
I can’t wait to try this! This looks really easy. I never would have guessed.
Those look really cool! I would never have guessed that homemade lipstick could look like that. I’ll be putting that on my list of things to try in the future…