Make-up: Making Foundation

Making a foundation is a several-step process that needs time and a bit of patience. It is however, great fun and quite rewarding when you are finished and can enjoy using your own 100%, perfectly-matched-to-your-skin-tone foundation.

I do foundation once a year, making sure I have enough to last a year. Any surplus from the previous batch is thrown out as soon as I am satisfied with the new.

Check The Forecast, Then Mix Your Pigments

I always choose a Spring day with good even light as the color mixture needs to be tested continuously in natural daylight. The first phase is mixing pigments to match skin tone. It usually takes me about an hour to achieve this. (This may sound like a terribly long time, but I'm sure if I did it more often, it wouldn't be nearly as time consuming). I use only cosmetics-grade pigments from reputable suppliers of cosmetics ingredients!

Mix Color With Base

Once the skin tone color is ready, it's merely a question of adding the color mixture to the base of choice. I do a cream, a lotion, and a mineral powder foundation every year. For mineral powder foundation, the color mixture is added to a base-powder mixture and thoroughly mixed together. This base mixture can be sheer, semi-opaque or opaque.
This year, I made a semi-opaque mineral foundation. (Adjusting from semi-opaque to opaque is a question of how much titanium dioxide is present in the base mixture and/or color mixture).

It's possible to buy pre-mixed powder bases. I've tried doing the whole base mixture from scratch as well as using the pre-mixed. They both work just fine. (admittedly, pre-mixed is easier)

The 2010 Harvest

Pictured above is my (half finished) 2010 batch of foundations. In the serum bottle, the color has been mixed with my own Bare Basic Sun Lotion to create a fluid foundation. In the little jar, the color has been mixed into a portion of my own Herbal Repair Eye Toning Solution to create a light cream foundation.

The powder container is a pure mineral foundation that spans from almost sheer (with a light application) to 75% coverage (with a generous application). So far, I've never done labels for my make-up containers.

Maybe I'll get around to it one of these years.