Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
Our new mineral Makeup Kits are perfect for “Mom’s Night Out”. Grab your girlfriends and have a blast creating your custom shades of eye shadow.
Thanks for the nice review. We’re glad you enjoyed the kit and all the color options.
Thank you iVillage for calling us “Trendy!” We’ll take that compliment with pride. Here’s what they said:
This is our new soft beige mica. We love it for mineral makeup bronzers, foundations, eyeshadows and lipsticks! It is a nice neutral color that acts as a base for many of the foundation recipes in our Mineral Makeup Guide.Of course, the colorant works in melt and pour soap as well.
We are feeling the love this week as two beauty blogs recognize our super fab (eyes downcast modestly) Eye Shadow Making kits.
Thank you Beauty Secrets Revealedand Beauty Tips for the recognition.
Thank you to Mineral Make Up Blog for reviewing our eye shadow kit. This is what they had to say about our product:
Lately, I have just noticed that there is a growing number of mineral makeup mavens out there who are more adventurous and started mixing their own formulations, adding some minerals to make their finishing powder or foundation work for them *maybe for oil control*, and some super adventurous ones have ventured into color like blushes and eyeshadows.
Check out Bramble and Berry’s Custom Mineral Eyeshadow Kits. The kit helps in our DIY venture with what shades we would want to use as our eyeshadows. The kit contains all the ingredients needed to make eyeshadows, measuring scoops plus pots to store them with. They come in two sets, one in “Neutrals and Metallics”, and one in “Vivid.” With that, they also provide you with an instruction booklet to be able to achieve what shade you want to create. Sounds fun, right? They all retail for $44.95, and with that much ingredients, I think that alot of shades can be created.
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
Thank you to LaMusica Online for including our Mineral Make Up Eye Shadow Kit in their annual Mother’s Day Gift Guide.
We appreciate the props.
Isn’t this the cutest soap you’ve ever seen (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)? Okay. Okay…So I rushed this project a little bit. I admit it. It’s the soap only a mother could love, right? Well, here’s my story and I’m sticking to it…I was in a hurry to showcase our new Aloha Molds, featured above, but my mind was on something else – our new Mineral Makeup Kits. In the last few weeks, I’ve made over 30 different eye shadows and I’m so excited we’ve launched a brand-spankin-new product line.
We’ve been industrious this month, designing a Mineral Make Up Making system. Mineral Make Up has gotten really popular as of late, partially because of its message of purity and naturalness. The claims are impressive: “Make-up that’s good for your skin!”, “superior coverage!”, “amazing, natural look without man-made chemicals,” “natural and preservative-free so allergic reactions are a thing of the past!”, “no Nano-Particles!”, “no allergy risk!”, “save you time and money, these are actually good for our skin!”, “pure formulations are safer!”, and “You can sleep in it!”
Bramble Berry doesn’t claim any of those things. We’ll leave that to the infomercials. We just have all the ingredients and the know-how to mix the exceedingly pricey mineral make up yourself, at home, for personal use or to start your own mineral make up empire.
I had fun today, playing some of the formulations that we’re designing for our own Mineral Make Up Instructional book. Check out all of the colors I created in under an hour!
Starting out, I tried to figure out what I wanted to blend. Having little inspiration, I decided to blend a color to match the table.
A little Shamrock Green, Pearly White, Sericite and Aqua Pearl matched the shade of the table close to perfectly.
One thing that surprised me was how different the shades appeared on my hand compared to the white paper. The peach tones in my hand warmed up the blend and made it more appealing and shimmery.
Adding Black Luster Mica, Kaolin Clay and Titanium Dioxide provided the differing shades and hues on the paper. It was thrilling to see how much variation came from just one small addition. The combination of ingredients is mind boggling in its infinite color choices.
This is just the start of the mineral make up eye shadow kit that we’re working on. I designed a subtle peach golden-y colors that I’ll be trying this week. I’m going for a warm, sun-kissed, subtle look that brightens up my eyes and makes me appear as though I’ve just come back from a sleep-filled vacation.
Let’s hope the homemade eye shadow creation doesn’t make me appear jaundiced and in need of a good light treatment.
This is the final installment of our lipstick making tutorial. Post any questions you have and I will answer them in the comments section.
Filling these little tubes requires either a very steady arm or a set of plastic droppers. I personally use droppers but for big single color batches, you can buy a filling tray from MMS.
Check out the color variations I was able to achieve with just the colors in our Lipsafe Color Sampler pack. I added titanium dioxide to some of the colors but other than that, just relied heavily on the lipsafe micas and oxides easily available.
Ingredient Listing for your lipstick is simple – list what the product is, INCI names in descending order of use, net weight of product and who manufactured the product. The FDA has a really comprehensive web site about labeling lipsticks. You can find it here.
Quoting from their official rules (and this part is long – if you’re not interested in labeling information, just skip all the text in italics):
Who: “The name and business address appearing on the label may be those of the manufacturer, packer or distributor.
If the name and address is not that of the manufacturer, the name must be preceded by phrases such as “Manufactured for …”, “Distributed by …”, or other appropriate wording.
The name of the firm must be the corporate name, and the address may be that of the principal place of business. Stating also the name of a corporation’s particular division is optional.
The business address must include the street address, name of the city and state, and the ZIP code. The street address may be omitted if the firm is listed in a current city or telephone directory.”
Ingredient Listing: “Ingredients other than colors present at a concentration exceeding 1% in descending order or predominance, followed by ingredients other than colors present at 1% or less in any order, followed by colors present at any concentration listed in any order.”
A word on the phrase, “The safety of this product has not yet been determined.” The short answer is that all of the ingredients in your lip balm have been tested and generally recognized as safe (GRAS). According to (b) below, your lip balm and lipstick probably does not require the safety warning. To be on the safe side, you’ll want to read and interpret the rules yourself and also check with your insurance company.
Officially, the FDA has this to say about the phrase: “A cosmetic is considered misbranded if its safety has not adequately been substantiated, and it does not bear the following conspicuous statement on the PDP:
Warning – The safety of this product has not been determined.
The safety of a cosmetic may be considered adequately substantiated if experts qualified by scientific training and experience can reasonably conclude from the available toxicological and other test data, chemical composition, and other pertinent information that the product is not injurious to consumers under conditions of customary use and reasonably foreseeable conditions of misuse.
The safety of a cosmetic can adequately be substantiated by:
a. Reliance on available toxicological test data on its ingredients and on similar products, and
b. Performance of additional toxicological and other testing appropriate in the light of the existing data.
Even if the safety of each ingredient has been substantiated, there usually still is at least some toxicological testing needed with the formulated product to assure adequate safety substantiation.“
The FDA’s phone number, should you be curious about interpreting any of their information is: 1-888-463-6332. This is the main FDA Phone Number for general inquiries. They’ll pass you off to another department for specific labeling questions.
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If you have questions, comments or want to share your successes with lipstick making, please post in the comments section and I’ll do my best to answer.
You can make a great lipstick out of your favorite lip balm recipe. If you don’t have a favorite from-scratch recipe, you can use a pre-made base like the one here or I’ve designed a few recipes for making lipstick at home below. Remember, if the recipe calls for a liquid oil that you don’t have, you can substitute any liquid oil.
Sheer Lipstick
2 oz. Beeswax
2 oz. Grapeseed Oil
1 oz. Wheatgerm Oil
optional 1 tsp. Zinc Oxide (by volume – optional – may substitute titanium dioxide)
4 tsp. lip safe mica (by volume – mix and match color to perfection)
The Zinc Oxide will provide a opaque, matte effect to your lipstick. If you use just mica, you will have a more sheer lip balm.
Melt the beeswax in a double boiler. Once fully melted, add the Grapeseed and Wheatgerm oil. Pour your colorant into the double boiler and stir well. Let this mixture sit until it begins to thicken slightly (thus suspending the colorant better) and pour into jars or tubes
Matte Lipstick
Because of the Candelilla wax, this lipstick is a more waxy feeling lipstick than the Sheer Lipstick. The Candelilla wax helps the color adhere to the lips.
Phase 1
4 oz. Castor Oil
4 oz. Jojoba oil
.5 oz. Beeswax
1 oz. Candelilla wax
1/4 oz. wheatgerm oil
Colorant phase
8 full teaspoons of lip safe mica or lip-approved pigment
optional: 1 teaspoon of titanium dioxide
1 oz. Castor, Olive or Wheatgerm oil Hint: Castor provides more shine than Olive or Wheatgerm
Melt the waxes in a double boiler. Once they are fully melted, add the Castor Oil and Jojoba oil. In a separate bowl, add your mica to the liquid oil of your choice. Mix in well and make sure there are no clumps. Add the colorant mixture into your double boiler and mix thoroughly. Remove this mixture from the double boiler and let sit until mixture begins to cool and thicken (thus suspending the colorant through out the lipstick). Once cooled to an appropriate thickness, pour into jars or tubes.
Not sure that you’ve got the best color or the nicest texture? I like to freeze a few butter knives in the freezer for an hour prior to making the lipstick. By dipping the end of a frozen knife into your colored lipstick mixture, you can instantly test the color and texture of your homemade creation.
Thank you to Koinonia Community for this recipe designed just for our slidey tins!
Hey Anne-Marie! I love the chocolate lip gloss.
Here you go…a recipe for a small (test) batch.
2T apricot kernal oil
1T beeswax
1T cocoa butter
6 chocolate chips
Melt together.
Add:5 drops vanilla EO
oil from 3 vitamin E capsules
It makes 4 .25 oz size slider tins. I hope you enjoy. It just has a hint of flavor (not enough to keep you licking it all off) but a great aroma. Glossy too! Natalie
Thanks for sharing! I’ll have photos and a report from the Portland Soaper’s Unite luncheon up tomorrow.
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.
Click here for day one – lip stick colorants
When making lipstick, there are a lot of different ingredients you can use. The basic ingredients are covered here but there are many, many more exotic oils, waxes and butters that can be used in lipsticks.
Wax – Waxes can be beeswax, candelilla wax, jasmine wax, orange wax and ozokerite wax. Most common to the home crafter is beeswax because of its pricing and easy availability. For vegans, candelilla wax is the preferred alternative since it is derived from a plant. Waxes are used to help provide a barrier against the elements, seal moisture in the lips and keep color on your lips. Waxes also help to provide shape and form to the lipstick mixture.
Oils – Oil in lipstick are used to be moisturizing, help provide a barrier against weather and also mix with the waxes to form a smooth, spreadable mixture. Popular oils in lipsticks are Sweet Almond Oil, Avocado Oil, Olive Oil and Hempseed oil. There are many other liquid oil options to use. It’s fun to play around with exotic or lesser known oils but remember, if your lipstick really takes off in the market, you want to make sure that the oils you choose are easily available and cost effective.
Butters – Butters are used in much the same way as oils are. They are designed to moisturize, help protect and make a stable mixture that is solid at room temperature yet glides and melts on the lips. Common butters in lip balm recipes are Shea Butter, Mango Butter and Cocoa Butter. Generally, large brands of lipstick do not use butters in their formulations. Since butters are comprised of many different fatty acid chains, they are described as “polymorphic,” which means that they have the ability to crystallize in several different forms according to how the liquid fat is solidified. What this means to you is that butters must be treated with gentle loving care in lipsticks. You need to melt them slowly (temper them) and then immediately place the finished product into the freezer for quick chilling. This will help to minimize any crystals that might form hard, unsightly bumps in your final product. Or, you can do what the “big guys” do and just avoid butters all together.
Lip Safe Fragrance – Lip Safe Fragrances are commonly referred to as “flavors.” They are not the traditional alcohol based flavors or extracts in the grocery store. While fragrance oils have up to 3500 different ingredients that can go into them, less than 10% of them are classified as safe for lips. This is because you “eat” your lipstick so anything that goes onto your lips must be GRAS (“generally recognized as safe” as classified by the FDA). Flavor oils, or lip safe fragrances, do not taste like anything. Rather, the user is tricked into believing that the lipstick or lip balm “tastes” because they inhale the scent. Seventy-Five percent of what we taste is actually from our sense of smell.
Before you get started, gather your equipment and ingredients.
Equipment Needed:
droppers
knives
spoons
small glass jars (microwaveable)
chapstick tubes/or lip pots
lip safe colorants
beeswax or another wax
liquid oil (sweet almond oil, hazelnut oil, jojoba oil – it’s your choice)
lip safe flavor