3D Machine Made Cosmetic Colors

What a superb way to peddle the hardware at the retail level.  Every woman will want one.  And who would have ever thought that the cosmetics racket, and yes it is about selling scant content and ample bull**** for a wonderfully tidy sum by direct methods.

Quite seriously, it is an industry that truly deserves to catch heat from new technology.

I keep forgetting that new tools create their own product solutions often totally outside anyone’s best expectation.  This is no better example.

A Harvard Woman Figured Out How To 3D Print Makeup From Any Home Computer And The Demo Is Mindblowing

By Alyson Shontell | Business Insider –

Grace Choi was at Harvard Business School when she 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.

Choi created a mini home printer, Mink, that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the Internet.

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.

TechCrunch Disrupt

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

TechCrunch Disrupt

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

TechCrunch Disrupt

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

TechCrunch Disrupt

Here Choi is, printing out the pink eye shadow.

TechCrunch Disrupt

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

TechCrunch Disrupt

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

TechCrunch Disrupt

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."

TechCrunch Disrupt

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