Are You Interested in Knowing What You Are Applying to Your Lips?

We are “eating” our lipstick every time our lick your lips, that’s why it needs to be free of nasty chemicals. Just as there are healthy and unhealthy foods, the same applies to lipstick products

Demystify the makeup industry by making your own luxurious skin care products at a fraction of commercial prices. Natural lip sticks provide: quality, purity, and performance without the chemicals.

Making your own lipstick is not as difficult as you think!

Basically lip sticks and lip balms are an emulsion of oils and wax with depending on what we put in them:

- Waxes may be natural secretions of plants or animals, artificially produced by purification from natural or completely synthetic like Paraffin (a petroleum wax) that is commonly encountered waxes in the cosmetic commercial industry.

As to the waxes, many skin care crafters use beeswax simply because it is inexpensive, easy to find, anti-bacterial so it preserve your lip products better but also because it is a flexible medium hard wax that gives a nice coating texture to the lips. Vegetable waxes like Macadamia wax or Carnauba wax are very hard and brittle and will not achieve the comfort of Beeswax.

However the “professionals” prefer to carefully blend their waxes with an eye for getting it just right.

When formulating lip-sticks there are several things to consider:

1- You need to keep your formula soft enough to allow the mica minerals to show up.

2- If the wax is hard, the colour is unable to shine through.

3-The iron oxides will make beautiful purples and deep reds but use a tiny amount of oxides, to keep the lip formula from feeling gritty.

4- Use liquid dyes to deeper the colour and to keep the colour longer on the lips.

5-The clearer the solution you add the mineral mica to, the more the sparkly tone it will give off. Mica needs to have light refraction in order to shimmer.

6- Lip products are basically blends of oil and wax. The more oil in a recipe, the softer the product. The more wax, the harder.

A lip product may exist to protect your lips only. In this case, it will be un-coloured or lightly coloured just so it is pretty.

Alternatively, a lip product may exist to colour your lips! In this case, you will typically find a blend of three agents: dyes, pigments and mica.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to formulating lip colours. There are several different end effects: matte, satin, pearl, metallic, medium sparkle and high sparkle.

You will need dyes and oxide pigments in order to have colour transfer to your lips that will last; mica alone will not achieve this. Matte sticks will have very little mica in them but more dyes and oxide bases instead.

Often the shimmers are used over the top of the more subdued or natural looking colours for the glitz. One of the favourites, Diamond Cluster Mica gives off sparkles like tiny mirrors to enhance the fun side of makeup. You may also try the fabulous 24 Karat Gold Mica to add a touch of pure elegance.

You may wish to seal and shine your fresh lip colour look by adding a clear lip gloss on top.

Ready to go and ready to glow!

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