 "Watch: Point, click and 3D print your own make-up!")
Ladies, remember those times when you’d admire a colleague’s eye shadow colour, write down the name or number and spend agonising hours looking for it in various beauty stores? Kiss those troubles good-bye.
Multiple media outlets (read here, here and here) have been going beserk reporting on Grace Choi and her new product, Mink - a 3D printer that will print make-up for you pretty much instantaneously.
According to Choi’s website, the printer “…can take any image and instantly transform it into a wearable color cosmetic, turning any camera, phoneor laptop into an endless beauty aisle.” The product works like an inkjet printer and needs no extra software.
The Harvard Business School grad set out to disrupt the multi-billion dollar beauty industry, which, according to her, “makes a whole lot of money on a whole lot of bullshit,” by doing something that technology has made uber accessible - mixing colours.
The way it works is absurdly simple (at least that’s what it looks like from Choi’s TechCrunch Disrupt presentation). If a particular colour catches your eye during your endless hours of internet browsing, you simply use freely available software to copy the colour’s hex code and paste it into a program like Photoshop or Paint and press ‘Print’. Voila! A few minutes later you’ll have your own little box of eye shadow in your favourite shade. And the best part is the print capsule fits easily into existing compacts.
What about the quality, you might ask. Choi’s got that covered too. She says that all cosmetic products, from the fanciest face creams to the most basic nail polishes, are made from the same substrates.
“We’re going to live in a world where you can take a picture of your friend’s lipstick and print it out,” Choi said in the video.
Choi intends to sell Mink for $300 a piece initially, with inks and substrates being priced moderately. The target audience will be girls between the ages of 13 to 21 years. Though the printer can only print eye shadow now, it will soon print lipsticks, creams and other beauty products.
For Choi, the biggest take-away from the product is that girls will finally be able to decide what they think is ‘pretty’ and not what popular demand deems acceptable.
Watch Choi’s presentation below:
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