Lipstick | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 2)

What's in here? What's it do? And can I make it from scratch? It's the stuff inside yourself. Ingredients. You can think of lipstick as a slightly more complicated crayon. Crayons are made of waxes and colors, and lipsticks have waxes and colors in them too. But if you've ever tried drawing on your face with a crayon, you'll find that it doesn't really work the way you'd like, because crayons are hard; they need to write on a hard surface. Whereas lipsticks have to be soft because your lips are soft.

So, in addition to the waxes and colors, they also contain oils and a bunch of other stuff depending on exactly what type of lipstick you buy. But what I really want to talk about is the reason you buy lipstick in the first place, and that is its color. Cochineal is a scale insect that feeds on prickly pear plants, and it was used to make dye in South America hundreds of years ago. Now, these bugs produce a chemical called carbonic acid, which is this brilliant red color.

To get the dye out of the bugs, you kill them. Specifically, you kill the pregnant females, because that's where the dye is. It takes about ninety thousand or so bugs to make one kilogram of dry cochineal powder. Today, we still use cochineal to color not just lipsticks, but also foods. Look for cochineal extract or carmine, which is made from carminic acid, on an ingredients label.

So, at this point, you might be wondering, why do we use bugs to color food? I mean, ideally, wouldn't we just make all of our colors in a lab somewhere? Actually, that is mostly what happens these days. But it turns out that many of the brilliant non-white, non-black colors are chemically really hard to make. So, for most of human history, we've had to rely on nature to do all the complicated chemistry of color making for us. Hence, the grinding up of bugs.

Now, once chemists started being able to make reds like carmine in a lab, the use of bug juice went way down. Although, it's been enjoying a bit of a resurgence lately because people have been asking for all-natural ingredients. Go figure! Now, if you look at the ingredients of a lipstick, you'll see that there's usually more than one color ingredient. Typically, these color ingredients are described both by a regular English name, like Red Seven Lake, or by a color index or CI number.

This number can sometimes tell you more than you'd think, like a secret code. So, for example, any number starting with seven-five is a natural color. So carmine is seven-five-four-seven-zero. Any number starting with seven-seven is an inorganic compound, which is basically something that doesn't have carbon atoms. Titanium dioxide, which is white and mixed with red to make pink lipstick, is seven-seven-eight-nine-one. Then, there's seven-seven-four-nine-one, nine-two, and nine-nine, which are all slightly different versions of iron oxides, also known as rust. Yup, sometimes the rust red color of your favorite lipstick is literally rust.

So now that we know what's in lipstick and how it works, I'm gonna try and make my own from scratch using natural ingredients, starting with rust as my homemade lipstick colorant. And I'm going to use mica for some glitter and shine. Now, mica comes from granite and other rocks. This stuff is the best glitter balm material I have ever seen. It gets everywhere and never comes out, so use that information wisely.

As for my waxes, I've got beeswax, which comes from bees, and paraffin wax, which comes from crude oil. As for the oils, I've got canola oil and coconut oil. I'm just going to assume that the rest of the stuff in lipstick doesn't matter all that much. So we'll see how right or wrong I am.

[Music] Okay, time to pour this into a lipstick mold. Well, so much for that idea. Now we let this harden. Let's try it! I made a bit of a mess of things, but here's the mold, and I'm just gonna pop it open.

[Music] Oh wait, wait. Here it comes! Ah, lipstick! Okay, the moment of truth. Here we go!

[Music] I have to say, that's actually the first time I've ever done that. So let me get my mirror here and see. Oh! Oh my god, it worked! That's amazing!

Hey, that is not bad. I really sort of... I don't really get... Okay, so we did it! We made lipstick! I can't tell though if it's really glittery. The red, the iron definitely worked, but I don't know if it shimmers as much as I wanted it to. It's possible that the mica settled to the bottom of the mold while it was still cooling, and the way to fix that would be to use even more finely divided mica.

But, I would give this... I would give this... I would give this a nine out of ten. Eight and a half. Eight and a half out of ten! So if you guys have ideas on how to improve this recipe, let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter. And if you have an idea for an episode, let me know as well.

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