Grace Choi
Grace Choi
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 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**t," Choi said at TechCrunch Disrupt conference 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 makeup companies use in their products. She also says the ink is FDA approved.
Choi created a mini home printer, Mink, that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the Internet.
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 partner with traditional printing companies in the video below.
Here's how Mink, Choi's makeup-printing machine, works.
First, find a color you want to print. Choi says her machine will print creamy lipsticks or powdery eye shadows.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Use the color picker to copy the hex code of the color you've chosen. In this demo, Choi chose pink.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Using Microsoft Paint or Photoshop, paste the hex code into a new document. You'll see the color you want to print pop up.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Print the color, like you'd print any other document on your computer.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Here Choi is, printing out the pink eye shadow.
TechCrunch Disrupt
This is what the finished product looks like. It comes in a little Mink-provided container that looks just like eye shadow.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Choi dips a makeup brush in the freshly-printed powder to show it really is makeup.
TechCrunch Disrupt
Then she brushes the pink on her hand. "Mink enables the web to become the biggest beauty store in the world," says Choi. "We're going to live in a world where you can take a picture of your friend's lipstick and print it out."
TechCrunch Disrupt