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make everything the lips are one of the most sensitive organs on the human body
and their shape and color strongly linked to sexual attractiveness and
feminine attributes some studies have shown that the fullness of female lips
be an indicator of their health and fertility historically the coloring of
one's lips to enhance that attribute dates back at least 5,000 years coloring
made from crushed stones or red soil called ochre were some of the earliest
forms of lip coloring the red dye from the carmine insect was used by Cleopatra
for her lips the fashion ability of lipstick has varied throughout history
with the becoming associated with prostitution and sexual immorality at
various points or brought back again because of royalty or other celebrities
who popularized it lip balm shares a similar history to lipstick as it
contains many similar ingredients of oils and waxes that can help moisturize
chapped lips lip balm worn by both men and women can be traced back to at least
5,000 years ago in China both lipstick and lip balm didn't reach the actual
modern stick form until around the turn of the 20th century previously being
more like creams powders or paints for my lipstick I'm gonna go with the same
crimson color use since Cleopatra / instead of the Mediterranean carmine bug
I'm gonna use the bug that eventually supplanted it as it even stronger source
of the dye cochineal this tiny bug is still commonly used in many shades of
lipstick today down in Mexico I got to learn how these
little bugs are raised and harvested taking around three months from when
they first hatch between the ready to be used as a dye thanks to Manuel I was
able to collect a batch for myself to take home next I'll need a waxy
substance to form the base of my lipstick so I'm gonna collect some
beeswax back when I made my original sandwich from scratch I was able to
harvest some honey from a colony however I didn't get to collect the leftover wax
fortunately since then my brother and his wife have started raising their own
bees so I paid them a visit and accompanied them on one of their regular
inspections I went every few weeks they need to do an inspection and check on
the health and size of the colony one of the big issues is checking to make sure
they don't outgrow their hive box we're at 80% full right we are going to seal
putting another Box stock once a box is about 80% full they start to raise a new
queen and half the colony swarms and flies off to find the new location for
new hives so if they start to reach that size need to add a new box for them to
expand their hive they don't have stinger so if you want... males do not
another item that's needed to be checked in the state of the hives queen in this
inspection actually couldn't find the Queen so the next step is in to try and
find any fresh eggs which is evidence that the queen has been there in the
past 1 to 3 days no eggs
one of the frames they found a cell that contained a new queen larva here queen
cell right there see it's capped on the bottom which means the old one likely
died in the colony is already working on replacing her next a mite check needs to
be done to check for any parasites there colony last year was nearly wiped out
from a mite infestation under the hive is a board where any dead bees and mites
would fall off on to ya you can see a little black things it might be some old
ones right there reviewing if there is any infestation forming and on which
part of the hive it's at fortunately this year they're looking pretty good
with minimal mites lastly sometimes the bees form honeycombs outside of the
frames called Burkle which can just make a mess basically in time they're not
building where we wanted to we just end up scraping it off make wax out of so
these need to be scraped off and will provide me with some of the beeswax I'm
after now you're a murderer and smash all these baby bees baby tell me thanks
to my brother and his wife I now have some beeswax to render it into something
useful I'll just need to melt it and then screen out any dead bugs or other
debris the beeswax will form a fairly hard substance so next I'll need some
ingredients that will soften it so it'll spread on the lips first up a vegetable
oil I've already made one vegetable oil previously when I made my sandwich from
scratch from sunflower seeds fortunately I still have a bunch of
them left over way back then I built a crude makeshift oil press to extract the
oil which was not the most effective fortunately since then I've been able to
acquire a better press which makes it slightly easier
lastly to soften my lip compounds even further some cocoa butter previously
when I made my own chocolate from scratch
i was able to help harvest the seeds of the cacao tree which we then fermented
dried and roasted from those beans I was able to press it to extract the fats of
the seeds to produce my own cocoa butter
now that had my cochineal, oil, butter and wax I should have everything to make
some lipstick but before I attempt it I want to consult with professional
cosmetics producer Karoline Wells and do a trial run with some store-bought
ingredients first so I have some cocoa butter and beeswax and then I took some
of the cochineal and grinding them up and it's a little bit of oil to see how
they mix I'm gonna have you swatch those on your hand and show us how much
pigment you got out of there because I'm suspecting you didn't give very much all
right so that's that's very very sheer so you're not gonna get any kind of
opacity out of your lipstick so basically what it's going to end up
looking like is it'll look dark like this but it won't have any pigment
payoff so payoff is the measure of how much color comes off on the skin and
there really won't be a lot of color coming off on the skin how would I get
more color to come off then well if there's a difference between a pigment
so these are pigments this is a pigment dispersion of red 28 and it's the
closest in color that I could find to a carmine lake this is actually vegan we
don't use carmine in our lab but so you can see how much there's more opacity
there and you know this is also this is a titanium dioxide so this is an
inorganic pigment but there's also a lot of opacity there another thing that
you're going to need to do when you grind this stuff as you can see that
there's a whole lot of stuff in here that's not completely ground you're
going to need to make paint basically so you need to grind that stuff and grind
it and grind it some more and grind it some more in order to get it smooth like
those so those are the textures that I would go for but anything that's going
to be gritty you're not going to want that okay so still a little ways off
yeah so the pigment it's not really gonna
work at this point right but I can at least make a chapstick on this right
yeah okay so roughly what type of proportions what I want um you're gonna
want more oil than wax and butter so the butter you probably want a limit I would
recommend only about maybe a half ratio of that and then probably about three of
this and maybe one of that maybe more maybe less you're gonna have to
experiment until you find the right thing okay if you're gonna use the
microwave I would use it very very slowly so temper it like chocolate maybe
15 seconds 20 seconds 30 seconds at a time yeah it's really going to depend on
your personal preference it also doesn't feel as nice so are you gonna pour this
into a stick? yeah okay we'll find out all right just pour it into one of those
you just pour it right down like this it's called the flood method so
you're gonna flood the entire thing with with that carefully now we'll put this
in the freezer okay for a few minutes okay got most of it
on the counter
yep you know if it's opaque then it's solid okay so you can scrape that off
well what you're trying to do is you're trying to get those even on the top and
then you're gonna put that back in the freezer for a few more minutes all right
and then you're gonna pull that bottom there you go there's your lipstick
without any pigment in it yeah that's that's hard enough to be a lipstick
but the question is does they have any product payoff and you can tell by here
I'll show you this is one of ours and this has stick
structure so obviously it'll stay in that form but I'm gonna swatch this on
your skin and it'll show I'll show you what it should feel like so see how
there's a certain amount of give to that mmm that gives both the product and the
color that comes off so swatch yours next to it and see if yours is too hard
or too soft like it's close but probably a little too hard I think it's a little
bit too hard to put pigment in so you're gonna probably have to redo this formula
again and measure it really carefully so that you know how much is in there it
works good for a lip balm Oh actually yeah it does I mean it's very matte so
because it's got so much wax in it so there could be a good men's lip balm all
right well thanks for helping me make some chapstick yeah and hopefully I can
figure out how to make this pigment work all right
last time with Karoline I learned there's a little bit more to using the
cochineal and then actually we need a compound called alum in order to turn it
into a pigment it'll actually work with a lipstick unfortunately alum is a
little bit difficult to source there's some vague information online I've been
able to find this supposedly the ancient Greeks and Egyptians had a natural
source for it however I don't have that and I haven't been able to find a way to
simply make it from scratch so for the first option I'm gonna try using a
calcium salt and some sources I made it sound that that can be used in the place
of alum sounds like it might produce more of a purple hue but I'm gonna try
it see if it even works supposedly the metallic salts in general will work for
this process so I'm gonna try using an iron oxide that I collected in Arizona
and use it as an iron salt that will hopefully extract some of the pigment
then lastly also do control with the store bought alum and
how it's supposed to look but let's get a shot and crush up my little bugs make
it some pigments
Music
Glass Shatters
maybe it won't fall this time
Cracking Sound
No you cannot boil that
so have some of the iron oxide mixed with water a little bit of the water to
have the calcium carbonate Cody gave me calcite technically
they're an aluminum compound alright next have some of my soda ash I'll add that
to some boiling water one of them had the desired reaction well I've made a
huge mess so I've let the different solutions settle and precipitate and
have taken off the clear solution at the top and washed them further so that just
the pigment should hopefully settle at the bottom surprise this one was the
clearest one calcium carbonate which I was skeptical would even work actually
seems to work the best this is the alum I say the iron oxide here which has
pretty much no precipitate no separation so that's probably basically
bust but I'll strain it anyways and see if anything comes out then to remove the
solution at the top from all of them and then strain them and dry them and you'll
see how these pigments turn out so dark maybe because I didn't add enough alum
Music
I got a little bit of powder it's very weak I'm gonna try adding some of the
just straight iron oxide to it as well it has some kind of a reddish hue so
at least get something that works
ow! that metal gets hot
what a beautiful shade of purple and by purple
I mean brown so that turned out pretty brown but of actual pigment it's still
pretty purple so I'm gonna try just using this
but that looks a bit more purple I think so last I have the actual cochineal
lipstick made with the alum this is how it's supposed to be done hopefully we'll
get a little bit better of a result from this one it's still a little wet
definitely looks a lot redder than anything else we've done though this one
might actually work
so here I have all the final results of all the lipsticks and chap sticks I've
tried to make I'd say it actually looks pretty good and now go do the final test
the moment of truth you know try it out and see how their spreadability is and
for that I'm just gonna put on my arm that's a fail and get a very little bit
it is uh not that good it's hard to judge because it's skin tone but I don't
think I've worked either and then actual cochineal with alum yeah that
stuff that actually worked everything actually made entirely from scratch
failed did not even spread so doesn't even function as lipstick as chapstick
it probably works pretty good but I'm gonna keep going and see what I can do
for some other cosmetics and maybe I'll eventually make it back to making this
lipstick work a little better maybe later
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