Lipsticks: Explore how your favourite makeup product is made

Lipstick, in its most basic form, is a mixture of oils, waxes, and pigments that can be easily used on our lips. Creating a viable formula is not an easy task, and good lipsticks require a lot of time and sometimes hundreds of variations of the recipe to be perfect. Color, opacity, fragrance, and dryness are just a few of the important properties of lipsticks.

Lipstick now comes in a variety of formulas. You can find cream finish lipsticks, matte liquid lipsticks, lip lacquers, etc. Here we will discover how a basic bullet lipstick is created, the ones we have seen our mothers and grandmothers use, a product many of us cannot leave our house without.

Ingredients are chosen pre-hand before making lipstick. The most basic ingredients in any lipstick are waxes, oils, and pigments, but many other substances can be added to the mix to improve specific aspects of the final product and add new features such as fragrance, longevity, and gloss. Preservatives (to ensure longer shelf life), alcohol, fragrance added for customer pleasure, and others are some of the most common secondary ingredients.

Most Lipstick formulations follow a basic 4 step process:

1. Pigment mixture
The pigments and the quantity of the pigment is carefully selected and carefully mixed. The pigment is then combined with oils and passed through a three-roll mill, which grinds each particle to a size of 20 microns. The typical oil-to-pigment particle ratio is 2 to 1.

2. Combination of pigment with base wax
The pigment mixture is then combined into the base wax by simply mixing the liquids in a steam-jacketed kettle with one propeller agitator. Following the mixing of the pigments with the base, the resulting liquid is passed through a three-roll mill and typically ground down to particle sizes of 20 microns.

3. Molding
Molding is done at specific temperatures to eliminate certain undesirable byproducts of rapid cooling (also known as “cold marks”). The lipstick liquid is heated to around 80 degrees Celsius and is then poured into vertical split molds kept at 35 degrees Celsius.

4. Flaming
Once the lipstick has cooled, it is extracted from the molds and prepared for flaming (passing the sticks near one or more open flame torches to melt a thin layer of gloss around the lipsticks). This procedure will ensure that the lipstick looks better and is protected from outside air and influences (lipsticks can become rancid after prolonged exposure to air).

5. Packaging
The lipstick is then packed in it’s own tubes and sealed in the packaging provided by the brand.
The last and final step is the lipstick reaching your vanity and being applied on your lips.