As if I don’t have enough hobbies, I’ve decided to make my own mineral make-up. It started with me looking to buy mineral make-up (foundation) and not wanting to pay the premium. So instead, like a 60 dollar home-grown tomato, I decided to make my own.

I’ll be trying my first experiments in blending this weekend, but here’s the basic starter information I’ve learned so far.

You need three or four basic ingredients:

Pigments - all colors are made from black, red and yellow. You can buy browns that are already formulated as a starting point–much easier than trying to achieve browns or tans on your own and there’s not any difference in cost at most places.

Titanium Dioxide - This is a bright white and is used to help get the makeup to a usable, spreadable state. You can’t just spread the pigments on your face. Tapioca starch is also used either in combination or in place of the TD. (Talc is used also, but not considered to be a great ingredient because of its chalkiness.) I’m probably going to try the tapioca starch to begin because I can get it readily. The place I ordered pigments from didn’t happen to have TD. They had an extender product which is a mica coated with Titanium Dioxide–it looks like it will work, but I don’t really know if I want to use only the extender or if I’ll want something less reflective.

Mica - Mica provides a satin sheen, helps spreadability and can help hide wrinkles (due to its reflective nature.) I’m not sure how much I’ll like this one because the one thing I hate about foundations is sparkle or shine. There are no sparkles in the mica I ordered, but it does have a sheen. Since the pigments are dark and flat, I think some will be necessary, but for me, not a lot.

Zinc Oxide - this is a basic sunscreen and is also used to sooth skin (it’s in a lot of skin protectorant products). I’m not using this one for now. I don’t generally wear a lot of make-up and not out in the sun because then I sweat it off anyway. I may decide to add it later!

Here’s a website that reviewed a lot of products already on the market. I used it to get an idea of what ingredients I might want in my make-up.

Mineral Make-up Reviews

Of those, I really liked the sound of:

Affordable Mineral Makeup They use the least ingredients out there and had very reasonable prices. They have a forum and were great about answering my emailed questions.

Everyday Minerals Sample sizes available for order with reasonable pricing. I couldn’t find a list of ingredients.

Aromaleigh Recommended by a friend. Reasonable pricing. They have a very basic formula that uses minimal ingredients that sounds very nice.

Eyes Lips Face The prices seem very reasonable and a friend uses and recommends the products. There were more ingredients, including bismuth (which I believe would impart more of a shine/glitter than I want), but again, the price seemed very fair at first glance.

Sterling Minerals This one was a little higher in price (around 24 before shipping) but it lets you choose your skin sensitivity. Bascially, they have worked very hard with customers to find formulas that work for even the most sensitive skin.

I, brave fool that I am, gave my first mineral make-up recipes a try. I ordered some basic ingredients from DIY Cosmetics. I found their website a bit hard to use. They could benefit from a few more product descriptions and links. There’s mention of an articles section, but no link, and I couldn’t find it. For beginners, there really isn’t enough information about what is needed to get started. I spent a lot of time cross-referencing before I was finally able to put in an order.

DIY also doesn’t sell titanium dioxide powder, a main ingredient in “whitening” the basic colors to achieve an exact color match. Instead they have tapoica starch (which I bought at the grocery store because it was a lot cheaper.) I have no idea at this point which ingredient is better. The tapioca starch worked fine for me to get the color where I wanted it. I’d still like to try the titanium dioxide. I have heard that it is harder to get it to “disperse” throughout a powder, but I think it is less irritating to the skin for those with sensitive skin.

DIY does have very reasonable shipping charges. They also were one of the only sites where I found a recipe to get me started. There was other information on the site that I found useful, although again, navigating and finding it took quite some time.

Here’s what I started with:

Oxides:

Brown (their premixed version)
Tan (their premixed version)
Yellow (because I know my undertone is yellow rather than pink)

Fillers and Whiteners:

Mica Extender (a matte mica coated with titanium dioxide; easily dispersible)
Ultra Fine Mica (a satin matte mica)

Tapoica starch from the grocery

There’s several other ingredients available such as zinc oxide (sunscreen protection) and magnisuim stearate–but I didn’t need them to get started.

I used the basic recipe on the DIY site as a guide, although again, I didn’t buy all the ingredients (including the spoons). Using the brown as a base pigment, I got a nice brown/pink undertone blush. I could have continued making it “lighter” but there was a slight pink to it (a very pleasant pink, mind, but I have yellow undertones in my skin).

Here’s the recipe. In my case a single unit is 1/4 tsp, but you can use any measurement, including the special spoons–just keep the ratios the same.

Blush/medium foundation:

2 Mica extender
1.5 Mica
1/2 brown
3 tapioca
1/2 yellow

I added each ingredient one at a time and mixed and mixed on wax paper. It takes quite a bit of mixing to make sure there are no tiny lumps that will streak yellow/red/brown across your skin. There are special blenders you can buy or you can actually put it in your home blender. Were I making a larger batch, I would probably use the blender, but I just patiently mixed and smashed until there were no streaks.

The foundation that I think matches my skin closer:

2 Mica Extender
2 Mica
3 Tapioca
1/2 Tan oxide

What I found is that my skin could probably go with a little more tan or even a little less. Once the undertone was right, my skin wasn’t that particular. I could probably have added just a pinch more red (which is in the brown–I didn’t buy red oxide itself). Either way, the powder was invisible in room lighting and in the shade outside. In direct sunlight, right after application, I could see “powder” but it was light, not caked. That disappeared after the makeup settled.

Both these foundations are “matte” which is what I was after. No extra glittery look. What I like about it most so far is that it evens everything out. It’s light and it isn’t at all obvious that I have any makeup on.

What I didn’t like is that the tapioca starch was just a tiny, itsy-bit itchy and drying–I have very dry, ridiculously sensitive skin. The tapoica might work well for more oily skins. I’m going to try either titanium dioxide or rice flour in a different batch. Stay tuned!

I’ll also do a post on some of the sites that sell oxides, titanium dioxide, micas, etc. I still need to choose one and order titanium dioxide. Right now I’m leaning towards ordering from Coastal Scents because they seem to have a wide variety of micas, titanium dioxide, zinc oxide–and I think I may go ahead and get a red oxide so that I can really tweak the color exactly.

I posted my first two recipes here. I wasn’t in love with the tapioca starch so I decided to try a couple of variants.

This first one, for whiteners/blending, I used only the mica extender (mica coated with titanium dioxide) and the mica (mica has a very slight natural grey tone to it when next to tapioca starch or titanium dioxide). This changed the consistency of the mineral make-up to an amazing degree. It was much harder to mix–it was basically “sticker.” I found that the color mattered more also because there was more light reflection than when tapioca starch was used. Again, I used 1/4 tsp as the unit; any unit can be used as long as the ratios stay the same.

Here’s the recipe:

7 extender
1 mica
1 tan
pinch of brown (to bring back a little more red)

Notice that I used more ingredients–that’s mainly because I had more trouble getting the color where I wanted it. Having a red would have come in handy. I would have put a pinch of red in instead of the brown that I had on hand. This makeup was “heavier” but it also concealed better. It was smooth and soft feeling. It reminded me of Revlon’s colorstay makeup. I could feel it more on my face, it concealed very well, but it was a bit more “visible” because light reflected off of it. There was no powdery residue in sunlight, but there was a matte/reflective look. This is a makeup that I think would work very well for going out at night. It adhered very well to my skin and wasn’t as likely as the tapioca based stuff to just rub off in an hour. It was not irritating at all. No itch, no drying; it felt almost like a cream. This one could easily be added to a cream, in fact, to make a liquid foundation.

Next recipe I tried, I took the above result and added rice flour. Basically I didn’t find that the extender and the micas let me lighten to color as much as I wanted. I can’t give a recipe because I really added this and that as I went along, trying to get the color and consistency right.

Rice flour was cheap - 3 dollars for a pound in the grocery store. It’s not as white as tapioca starch and when you’re mixing it, it “feels” grittier. This actually was a good thing. It helps smear the mica and color pigments very nicely. I needed more rice flour than tapioca to whiten. This flour is a great place to start testing recipes–it’s cheap, and it left NO powdery residue. None. This was one where I could stand in sunlight and not see makeup or powder. It doesn’t adhere to skin as well as the micas–they are necessary to “finish” the recipe. I’m not sure I have the ratios where I want. Once I got the color where I wanted it, I think it could have used more mica–more sticking power. Of course, I can only put so many batches on my arms and face, so for today, I left it. I’ll likely revisit it tomorrow.

Also, once I added rice flour–there was no making this one into a liquid foundation (if you want to make a liquid foundation try using Suave Oatmeal Lotion as your whitening agent in place of titanium dioxide or the rice flour–most lotions contain titanium dioxide so once you get the basic color where you want it, you can use a hand-type lotion to whiten it to your exact skin tone and create a liquid foundation.).

The rice flour I had was not fine enough and didn’t dissolve. There may be special grinds of rice powder that make it possible, but with the graininess, it wouldn’t work with this type.

In just the few tries I’ve completed, I have enough make-up to last me a year. I’m not sure how much further I’ll go until I’ve tried out the ones I’ve created. I’d like to “wear” them a few days and see how they hold up. I’d still like to try titanium dioxide as a white and having a red oxide on hand would really help me get the colors where I want them. If I put in another order, I’d probably order zinc oxide (sunscreen) as well.

Got in some new supplies (ordered from TKB Trading — lowest prices I found, good basic info about each product and plenty of selections). The main portion of the order was to obtain titanium dioxide and some different mica. Both were coated with methicone, which supposedly makes them completely non-irritating. I also ordered boron nitride, something that is used in high end make-up and supposedly gives a nice finish. I tried all three of these white powders on my skin without any color added and none of them bothered my skin. I couldn’t tell much difference between the sheen of the mica and the boron other than the boron is a whiter powder (the mica has a slight greyish tinge.) Both are quite reflective, which is supposed to hide fine lines.

New oxide colors:

red oxide
red/blue oxide

The red oxide is…rather orange looking to my eye. I mixed the red, the red/blue, the yellow, the tan and the brown with some Suave Oatmeal cream. This turns it into a concealer, while whitening it at the same time. Obviously as is, they are too dark and also too red, yellow or whatever. What I wanted to do was see how the colors looked on my skin, even too dark. The closest matches appeared to be the red/blue or the brown.

I started mixing in yellow with that in mind, but eventually, because the red/blue was a bit purple and the brown a bit pink, I started over with the yellow–and added the red/blue. Either way, I got to the same place, the difference is that I needed more yellow–so starting with red/blue created a rather huge pile of pigment by the time I added enough yellow. The larger the pile, the harder it is to get the lumps out and get even distribution of color. Start very small. Mix between each ingredient. Don’t use more than 1/8 of a tsp of your main color (in my case yellow). Then add a pinch of secondary colors (in my case the red/blue).

The titanium dioxide is rather lumpy, and I experienced no real difference with the titanium coated mica versus the methicone coated titanium dioxide. Both are very creamy, somewhat difficult to mix and impart a sheen.

The mica coated with methicone was nice, a bit less gray than plain mica. Relatively easy to mix, adds creaminess and sheen.

The boron nitride is a nice sheen, a very nice white. Again, other than whiteness, I really couldn’t tell much difference between it and the mica. It may have adhered slightly more to my skin. It was almost twice as expensive.

In the following recipe, the sheen factor was too high for me. The makeup brushes on fairly well, but is sticky. The end result is that it looks like I used a liquid foundation. I was utterly amazed at this, because everything is a powder, but when you sweep it on with a brush–it looks liquid. I used a 1/4 tsp as the measurement tool.

1/2 yellow
pinch of red/blue (not even 1/16 tsp)

2 titanium dioxide (methicone coated)
1/2 mica (methicone coated)

I tried half with some boron nitride and half without. It adds sheen, but the formula doesn’t need it.

I thought the spreadability was too thick for what I wanted so I added:

2 rice powder

The rice powder helps the spreadability a lot and also takes away some of the sheen. For my next batch, I will probably put even less sheen by cutting back the titanium dioxide. The good news is that after wearing it an hour, the sheen backs off and the color stays on. There’s definitely some room to play there.

I have thus far spent about 45 dollars. I can still make several batches, but I must say that getting the color where I want it is hard. Off by just a pinch and suddenly I’m going back and forth with the yellow and the red/blue. I think the brown would have worked almost as well as the red/blue, by the way. The key is to use very, very little color.

The titanium dioxide was a wonderful whitening agent. I liked it, although it was hard to mix into the formula. Lots of patience required here. And do not tear a hole in the wax paper (wax paper was the best mixing surface I found.)

I liked the boron nitride and the mica, but I’d probably go with the mica because it was cheaper. The only real benefit to the boron nitrate was the whiter color, but you’re adding so little of it compared to the titanium dioxide and rice flour you’re not really adding much “white.” Add them last as they seem to have the least effect on the overall color.

It would be vastly easier to just buy samples from a vendor because getting to “beige” is very tough. Then getting the sheen versus powder/spread right is another challenge and I’m pretty sure I’m not where I want to be yet. Based on what I now know about ingredients, I’d probably start with one of these two:

Sterling Minerals This one was a little higher in price (around 24 before shipping) but it lets you choose your skin sensitivity. Bascially, they have worked very hard with customers to find formulas that work for even the most sensitive skin.

Affordable Mineral Makeup They use the least ingredients out there and had very reasonable prices. They have a forum and were great about answering my emailed questions. They run various contests for free merchandize: There’s one now that ends Sept 2: Here You’ll have to hurry to enter!