Flavor Oil Evaluation
30 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
Currently I’m working on flavor oil evaluation. There’s a large variation between the different suppliers and the range of strength between the different flavor oils. So far, my favorites are cinnamon, root beer, ginger and surprisingly, rose.
12 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
This was in a fortune cookie I received last year, and it represents how I feel – just on the cusp of selling – after years of preparation!
12 Jan 2012 Leave a Comment
I’ve been busy getting product ready for my Etsy Shop. The lipsticks were poured in December, this month I’ve been creating labels and taking pictures.
A lot of the time has been spent getting the sample program together – this will allow people to try out the lipstick before purchase. I’m hoping people like this feature.
Testing
06 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
I’m in the final stages of lipstick development! Preservative challenge testing is complete and I’m working on the final ingredient balancing. Production size batches are eminent. This step represents the culmination of years of study and research; although there remains so much to do after this point, it feels good to reach this important milestone!!
Maiden voyage of new lipstick mold
05 Oct 2011 Leave a Comment
I couldn’t wait to pour a larger batch in my new mold! Here is a picture of the very first lipstick that came out:
Here’s a picture of the mold opened up so you can see what the bullets look like:
Compounding a Fragrance Blend
03 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
Here is a bench shot of my essential oil blending stage of product development. I like essential oil because of the nuances of the fragrance. Essential oil is different from fragrance oil. In the industry, fragrance oil can be composed of proprietary ingredients, not disclosed to the buyer. Essential oils are steam distilled from the botanical material and usually have an anticipated range of composition. Because I like to have a better idea of the chemical composition of the ingredients I put in my lipstick, I use food grade essential oils. However, since the oil is distilled from botanical ingredients, it can vary within the range of composition depending on different factors that affect the growth habit and resources available to the plant from year to year. Therefore, the scent can change just an ever so slight, yet noticeable amount, from batch to batch. This is the nuanced nature of a natural product.
Here are a couple of up close shots of the essential oil blend. The one on top shows the oils before they’re mixed together – because they’re different colors, you can see the cinnamon oil sinks to the bottom and the lemongrass oil floats on top. The picture below it shows how they readily mix together with a bit of agitation.
Working on Colors
02 Jul 2011 Leave a Comment
I’ve been very busy at the bench working on lipstick colors. Notice the color wheel on the corkboard – this comes in very handy when trying to imagine which direction the skin undertone will interact with the lipstick color. Yellow and red make orange – to move it to a more neutral color add blue – yellow, red and blue make brown. The brown can have an overtone of pink, red, brown, etc. depending on the ratios of pigments. This is my rudimentary understanding of color mixing and I refer to that color wheel often.
One of the challenges faced with lipstick color artists is the lack of pure color. Most of the pigments have their own undertone, this has to be determined with a drawdown on white paper and then adjustments are made using this data.
Here is a tip: if you want to determine the undertone of your lipstick, lightly rub it on a piece of white paper. Here you can see if more yellow or blue appears. A lipstick can look like it has a blue tone, but when rubbed onto the white paper, the yellow will be able to be seen. If you have a ruddy red undertone, your red skin undertone will combine with the yellow undertone of the lipstick to create orange. If you have a problem with your lipstick turning orange on you, try to find lipstick with a more blue undertone. When you put on lipstick, you’re a color artist too – combining the undertone of the lipstick with your own natural undertone for your own unique color blend.
History of Lipstick
01 Apr 2011 Leave a Comment
I was recently doing some online research and stumbled across this interesting Harvard University paper on the History of Lipstick in the West by Sarah Schaffer 2006.
Here is the opening line from the paper: “This paper traces the history of lipstick’s social and legal regulation in Western seats of power, from Ur circa 3,500 B.C. to the present-day United States.” That certainly covers a lot of ground! It’s a long article and over half of the paper is the research reference guide.
I’ll hit a couple of the highlights, direct quotes from the paper are italicized:
Lipsick has played an important role in cultural expression: Flappers took a page from earlier women’s rights advocates, and wore scarlet lipstick “in a deliberate and, it seems, successful attempt to shock their elders.” Further into the paper, the 1970’s had noteworthy lipstick cultural expression, with different groups emerging: Looking at lipstick from a social perspective, people spent the 1970s busily rebelling both with and against lipstick. As it had so often before, lipstick became a symbol of social rebellion, adopted by both sexes of the punk-rock music and cultural movement to express sex, violence, and general nonconformity. On the polar opposite hand, however, feminists rebelled by not wearing lipstick. This era also saw the emergence of the “New Age Movement” which ushered in a cultural revolution that continues and has grown in momentum today. Lipstick producers responses to New Age movement demands included: plant extracts showing up in lipstick ingredients, formulas named and flavored like natural products, and advertising emphasis on lipsticks’ medicinal attributes.
The history of regulation of drugs and cosmetics has its share of scandal (from the notes) in the 1930’s: “When ninety people died from the solvent diethylene glycol in the drug Elixir Sulfanilamide-Massengill, which its manufacturer had tested for flavor but not effect, public pressure ensured that the House finally agreed to pass the new food, drug, and cosmetic safety regulation. That more people did not die from this elixir of sulfanilamide was due to FDA officials creatively realizing that, even though they lacked authority to seize the drug for deadliness, they could seize the drug on the misbranding technicality of calling itself an “elixir” without actually containing any alcohol, as required by the United States Pharmacopoeia’s definition of elixirs.” This particular scandal helped passage of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in the 1930′s.
This paper includes a detailed synopsis of the evolution of FDA authority and regulations in regards to labeling, dye delistings and industry input from the CTFA. I won’t bore you with a review of this part, those of you interested in this subject will find the paper quite an interesting read.
There are a few technical inaccuracies; another quote from the paper: Given that the average woman now eats one to three tubes of lipstick per year, or four to nine pounds of lipstick over the course of her lifetime this safety regulation seems wise. See my blog post entry just prior to this one for another opinion.
Thanks for reading!
How much lipstick do you eat in a year and over your lifetime?
16 Jan 2011 1 Comment
This graph assumes lipstick use begins at 16 years old
There is speculation among some of the cosmetic related websites that women who wear lipstick ingest anywhere from four pounds during her lifetime, up to one pound per year – depending on the website. I thought that sounded interesting, so I did some rough calculations and created a couple of charts to share with you.
To create the first chart, I estimated how many lipsticks I use in a year – placed that number at two lipsticks per year. Then, I placed the age most women begin to use lipstick at sixteen years. You can see that by the age of 67, if lipstick use averaged two per year, a woman would have used 100 tubes of lipstick. How much do 100 lipsticks weigh?
This chart estimates the cumulative weight of lipstick use
To answer this question, I created the second chart. It’s based on 5 grams per tube. My lipsticks weigh less than 5 grams per tube and about a third of that is used to anchor the stick – probably about three grams per tube is more accurate. According to the chart, if you were to ingest every gram of lipstick in your large lipstick tube, you would ingest just over 2 pounds of lipstick by the time you were 67 years old.
Much of the lipstick is used to anchor the stick into the tube – if you take this into account, the amount of lipstick one would use at two per year would be more like 1 pound by the time you were 67 years old, and I estimate this is probably still on the high side because some of the lipstick ends up on your drinking glass and getting wiped off during the day.
Conclusion: The charts assume all the lipstick is ingested, I estimate I actaully ingest half of what I apply. Therefore, I estimate using two lipsticks per year results in approximately 3 grams of lipstick ingestion per year – that would be one lipstick (the part that sticks above the turning mechanism). In fifty years, I estimate I would ingest to approximately 5.35 ounces - one third of a pound.
That was a fun exercise; I hope you enjoyed it too! Long live pouty puckers!
Patent for chisel to cut groove in rock
15 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
I use several colorants in my lipstick and lipbalm such as Zinc Oxide for the white color. There are several manufacturers of Zinc Oxide using different processes; one of the goals of processing is to remove toxic heavy metals. Heavy metals such as lead, cadmium and mercury are natural, but that’s not what the ‘natural living’ movement is aspiring toward, and there are FDA guidelines on the books today that limit the presence of heavy metals in cosmetics. I digress.
The issue of Zinc Oxide has been a topic of discussion on some of the online cosmetic manufacturing boards that I frequent and the issue of Zinc Oxide for sunblock has also entered the discussions. Some of the formulators have mentioned that BASF has a patent on Zinc Oxide being used for spf and also that BASF will come after any company claiming spf from Zinc Oxide that doesn’t use their Zinc Oxide in the formulation.
BASF has a patent on Zinc Oxide being used for sunscreen? How could that be, it’s been used for decades for that purpose! Sure enough, right there in the abstract is a definition of the sizes of particles which cover most of the cosmetic forms of Zinc Oxide.
For added interest, here is the last sentence of the abstract: “The particulate materials described above are preferable dispersed into an emulsion to facilitate their application onto the surface of the user’s skin. The invention further comprises cosmetic formulations having incorporated therein the particulate sunblock agents described above.”
I find it interesting that BASF was awarded a US Patent for ‘inventing’ an ingredient that’s been used in cosmetic and pharmacy compounds for decades. Will they try to get a patent for water as a hydrating agent next? As my darling husband summed this patent up with an eloquent analogy: “that’s kinda like getting a patent for any chisel that carves a groove in a rock.”
