Lipstick Making – Mixing Colors and Testing

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.