3D Makeup Printing

Today I will talk about the latest issue in relation to beauty meeting technology that has surfaced on the Internet recently which would be the technology of printing 3D Makeup from any ordinary computers. This technology can very well be the epitome of this blog.

Grace Choi has invented Mink, a mini home printer that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the Internet. Hailing from Harvard Business School, Grace decided to disrupt the beauty industry. She did a little research and realized that beauty brands create then majorly mark up their products by mixing lots of colors.

“The makeup industry makes a whole lot of money on a whole lot of bulls**t,” Choi said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. “They charge a huge premium on something that tech provides for free. That one thing is color.”

By that, she means color printers are available to everyone, and the ink they have is the same as the ink makeup companies use in their products. She also says the ink is FDA approved.

She demonstrated how it works, then brushed some of the freshly-printed makeup onto her hand. She answered a lot of the tough questions about how she’ll move beyond powders to creamier products and partner with traditional printing companies in the video below.

Here’s how Mink, Choi’s makeup-printing machine, works.

First, find a color you want to print. Choi says her machine will print creamy lipsticks or powdery eye shadows.

Use the color picker to copy the hex code of the color you’ve chosen. In this demo, Choi chose pink.

Using Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, paste the hex code into a new document. You’ll see the color you want to print pop up.

Print the color, like you’d print any other document on your computer.

Here Choi is, printing out the pink eye shadow.

This is what the finished product looks like. It comes in a little Mink-provided container that looks just like eye shadow.

Choi dips a makeup brush in the freshly-printed powder to show it really is makeup.

Then she brushes the pink on her hand. “Mink enables the web to become the biggest beauty store in the world,” says Choi. “We’re going to live in a world where you can take a picture of your friend’s lipstick and print it out.”

Now check out the video demo and listen to Choi answer tough questions about how she’ll bring the printer to market below:

After watching the video, I find  that this 3D makeup printing would be pretty cool to be honest. Think of all the makeup we can create, print and obtain in literally minutes! Whoever knew creating makeup could be this easy?! Everyone could just make their own makeup and never walk into a store anymore which would be really convenient. I like the idea of grabbing a colour off the internet and you could just get it at the comfort of your own home. But then again, I suppose that there will be consequences to this quite drastic change in obtaining makeup. Would people buy the 3D printer and abuse the power that they have? Would the colours be exactly similar to the ones you've seen and liked on the internet? From the video, the eyeshadow is not exactly 100% similar to the one in the YouTube video. How good would the quality turn out to be? How would this invention disrupt the beauty industry in the future? There's a lot of unanswered questions at the moment. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

So guys, what do y'all think about this 3D makeup printing invention? Let me know in the comments below :)