Lip Product Additives: How To Color Your Products
Customizing lip gloss is an art. A transparent gloss can transform your face, but a little color can draw a lot more attention to your cosmetics creations. We’ve learned that some lip product additives color your products better than others because they’re easier to work with, have longer staying power, and deliver the most dazzle. You’ll also want a range of tints so that you can customize a color you can’t find anywhere else.
Some people start by just adding a bit of the cosmetics they already have: a favorite lipstick, blush, or eye shadow. It can be a shortcut to the tint you want, but make sure the makeup is safe to use on lips. The FDA has strict guidelines for usage.
If you love working with natural ingredients, you can try alkanet root for a hint of pink, annatto seed powder for orange, chrorella for green, or unsweetened cocoa for brown. Most DIY beauty gurus move on from these, though; it can be difficult to get any significant opacity or intensity with these ingredients, and it’s hard to predict how their various textures will interact with your lip gloss base.
If you’re more serious about creating professional-grade lip gloss, you’ll want to use additives specifically created for that purpose. They won’t irritate or dry out your lips, and you can achieve just the right level of color by using more or less. Be aware, though, that most lip colorants include mica, an uncolored, naturally occurring mineral that can have a shimmery effect when purified or crushed. Micas have a finer texture that’s easy and fun to work with, and they don’t morph or bleed. But if you don’t know where that mica came from, it might have been mined in India and Madagascar—notorious locations for child labor and unsafe conditions.
At No Prob-Llama, we’ve ensured that our cosmetics pigments for lip gloss are responsibly sourced in the USA. Our mica comes from Hartwell, Georgia, where it’s mined with an eye toward preserving the environment. We know it’s responsibly sourced because we can track the mica from source to supply. This domestic mica is an important ingredient in some of the best tints we’ve created:
- Electric Fuchsia
- Ruby Gemstone
- Golden Bronze
- Red & Orange Duocrome
- Red & Blue Duocrome
- Yellow Gold Duocrome
- Red and Violet Duocrome
All No Prob-Llama pigments are luminous and shimmering, and some even have color-traveling effects that add extra dimension. As you familiarize yourself with lip product additives, you’ll learn how to color your products with ingredients that are easy to work with and that deliver consistent quality and give your lip gloss the right intensity. You can also use these tints in homemade soaps, shampoos, eye shadows, lipsticks, lotions, creams, and mineral makeup. Take a look at our collections to formulate the perfect lip gloss.