A Harvard Woman Figured Out How to 3D Print Makeup From Any Home computer, And the Demo Is Mindblowing
By Alyson Shontel, May 6, 2014
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 and 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—,” 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 that makeup companies use in their products. She says the ink is FDA-approved.
Choi created her own mini home 3D printer, Mink, that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the internet. It hooks up to a computer, just like a normal printer.
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 team up with traditional printing companies in the video below.
Here’s how Mink, Choi’s makeup-printing machine, works. Click here to read the full article.