Lots of girls spend half of their paychecks on boatloads of brand-name makeup. Companies like Sephora and MAC take advantage of women's obsession with makeup, pricing the best colors at a higher premium. Harvard Business School student Grace Choi was fed up with the whole industry, so she decided to create a 3D printer that can create any kind and color of makeup on demand.
It turns out that the materials that makeup is made out of are actually dirt cheap and these big-name companies all use the same machine to get their distinctive colors: an inkjet printer. Yeah, you read that right. An inkjet printer!
"The makeup industry makes a whole lot of money...by charging a huge premium on one thing that technology provides for free. That one thing is color," said Choi at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York.
The Mink 3D printer may be small, but it sure is mighty. To get the color you want, all you have to do is send an image of it to the Mink and then, voila! Your favorite share of lipstick, blush or eye shadow pops out of the printer. Talk about convenience! No more drug store stops on the way to work. No more fretting over the $35 lipstick at Sephora.
Those who buy Mink for its projected price of $300 will only have to go out and buy ink and the other raw materials when they run out, which shouldn't end up costing more than buying it all at Sephora. Well, unless you're a total makeup fiend.
"You don't have to spend any money or resources on actually getting the makeup, and the price per unit is going to be around the same as mass retailers, but with the most color options of any brand in the world," Choi said.
Her goal is to make makeup more convenient, more personal and a tad cheaper for consumers.
"The inkjet handles the pigment, and the same raw material substrates can create any type of makeup, from powders to cream to lipstick. Implementing this ability on the Mink is not hard to do, it's actually more of a business decision," Choi said. "What we're doing is taking out the bulls****. Big makeup companies take the pigment and the substrates and mix them together and then jack the price. We do the same thing and let you get the makeup right in your own house."
