Makeup from the Ground Up
Filed under: Uncategorized — Giulianna Maria Lamanna @ 8:25 AM
If you’ve been paying any attention at all to makeup ads in the past few years (and if you haven’t, shame on you! Bad consumer! Bad!), you’ve probably noticed that “all-natural” mineral makeup has been growing in popularity these last few years. It’s gotten so popular that major brands are producing cheaper knock-offs that contain many of the skin irritants and carcinogens that people generally buy mineral makeup to avoid.
What I’ve been wondering ever since I first heard of mineral makeup is, could I make my own from scratch? It is certainly possible to make it from home using purchased ingredients. But could you gather the basic ingredients from the wild and make it completely from scratch? That’s a bit trickier.
The primary ingredient in mineral makeup is mica, specifically sericite mica. (That’s why you’ll often hear these makeups referred to as “mica makeup.”) Mica is known for its perfect basal cleavage, which allows you to slice it incredibly thin (the fineness of mica powder is one of the major selling points of mineral makeup). One mineral makeup company has listed all their ingredients on their website; iron oxide (known better to anthropologists and primitive skills enthusiasts as red ochre) appears again and again. At the time that I accessed the website, there was a note at the top of the page announcing that they would be phasing out the use of ultramarine blue. Curious, I Googled “ultramarine blue” and found a 19th century recipe for making the pigment from the mineral lazurite and a few other ingredients (though since that particular recipe includes turpentine, obviously this would be suitable for painting canvas rather than your skin). One imagines you could find similar information for all of the ingredients.
I’m nowhere near ambitious enough to go digging for mica, scraping off rust, grinding everything down, mixing in plant oils, and so on and so forth, so I haven’t tried it yet. I don’t wear much makeup very often anyway, so I’d rather do without than go to all the trouble. But I do believe it would be possible to make your own mineral makeup from scratch, and if any of you want to try it for yourself, please come back here and tell us all about it!
Finely ground mineral powders are starting to be appreciated as a significant health risk. Just like asbestos any persistent particle entering the lungs or skin has the potential to induce persistent inflammation and carcinogenesis around it as the body tries to attack and remove it.
Ultrafine particles from combustion are a known cancer risk- the right size passes through the lungs, into the blood stream, where they trigger inflammation everywhere. Talcum powder is also emerging as a risk for reproductive cancers (as it is used on bottoms) but the link isn’t rock solid yet. People have only started using industrial mica powders on their faces every day for a couple of years now. Do women really want to line up once again to be human guinea pigs for the make up industry? They are only just starting to admit the phenylene diamines in hair dyes cause bladder cancer. Women should have learnt the lesson with lead based white face paint and belladonna eye drops in the 18th century.
Comment by void_genesis — 22 April 2008 @ 6:51 PM
I don’t think anything you grind down with a mortar and pestle would get small enough to get through lungs, skin or capillaries. You can get ultrafine particles from industrial mass-production, sure, but it seems to me that simply highlights again that almost anything, however benign, that you do at the level of a personal craft can become pathological when scaled up to industrial mass production.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 22 April 2008 @ 6:56 PM
Jason,
I think you’re wrong about that. According to this site: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/particle-sizes-d_934.html
(Note Micron = .001 millimeters)
Visible particles are about 40 microns and asbestos ranges from .7 - 90 microns.
Particles that will make it to the lungs are about 10 microns, and talcum ranges from .5 - 50 microns.
Since obsidian can be flaked down to a molecular edge (~.005 microns) it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that grinding a mineral on a stone can create particles in the 10 micron range. Especially when the entire purpose of the grinding is to create a fine, even powder suitable for suspension in a medium for use as make up.
–
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 28 April 2008 @ 10:01 AM
So, there are two solutions to this problem:
1)Don’t wear makeup.
2)Don’t wear makeup very often, and don’t breathe the powder in while applying any dry forms.
Personally, I don’t wear makeup most of the time. That’s about 90%, or better, of my life. But I like having the option to not have to go shell out my monetary votes on encouraging the vanity of our society.
If I’m going to be “vain” or showy, I want it to reflect who I am- self-sufficient.
-Khatta
Comment by Khatta — 9 June 2008 @ 6:41 PM
giulia — it’s so much fun reading your site (although it’s kept me from going outside and harvesting plants for about an hour now
i work with natural (mostly plant-based) dyes. quite a few could likely be used as cosmetics — one could mix them with a binder such as vegetable oil or animal fat, or perhaps just simply apply them as juice. (not sure if you ever did this with beets or berries as a kid.)
i haven’t experimented with this too much though — i mostly focus on putting pigments on paper or cloth. many pigments tend to have a stronger affinity for “protein” — wool, silk, hide, and, to our benefit here, skin — than they do for “cellulose” (or in other words, other plant fibers / materials), although that’s not the case universally.
of course, much of what you can make depends on what grows / makes itself available in your region. alkanet, safflower, cochineal, henna, turmeric, wild madder and the like yield reds, yellows, and browns, but grow primarily in more sub-tropical climes. (alkanet is probably an exception, as northern europeans historically cultivated one more hardy species.)
other, more local candidates for yellow and red pigment: beets, pokeberries (many berries for that matter), certain types of pollen. cleavers (galium aparine) come fromt eh same family as madder, a historical red dye, and contain a similar red pigment in their roots.
pure blues are a little harder to come by, but one could obtain those through indigo-producing plants such as woad, various types of indigofera, or japanese indigo (a knotweed).
heat makes many of these pigments persnickity, and sometimes even permanently changes yellows and reds to browns. sometimes long slow soaks in water will extract pigment … at other times one must cook or otherwise process the plant parts. i would happily share detailed instructions on processing plant pigments if that’s something you would be interested in.
many pigments grow in the world! slowly i learn more about the ones that grow wild (rather than the ones that must be laboriously cultivated).
thanks for great articles.
-alesandra
Comment by alesandra — 15 March 2009 @ 9:30 AM
Hey hey…
Be sure to see mine……
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