I Created My Own Custom Lipstick at Bite Lip Bar

Bite cosmetics (founded in 2012) is a Canada based company that concentrates more on lip products than other makeup products like highlighter or foundation. The products of the brand includes lip balms, lipsticks, lip-glosses, and even lip scrubs. One of the reasons Bite Beauty stand out to me so much is that it’s a cruelty free makeup brand; meaning that the brand doesn’t test on animals and they use all-natural products. So, your lips will definitely love you for the products you are giving them. 

A little time after Bite Beauty becomes a popular brand then comes the idea of the Lip Lab. The Lip Lab started with the concept of “DIY’ing” your very own lipstick shade. With this in mind you are able to go through the whole process of how your custom shade is made. You see the different color creams, the mixing with the little spatula, the freezing of the lipstick and a lot more. Here is how my experience went and why I loved every minute of it. 

The Experience

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I’ve never done anything like this before, so I was going into this very enthusiastic to get started. My thoughts on the shade I wanted was a caramel brown; something that would go well with my skin tone. The lip expert that I was assigned to listened to my shade vision and started putting yellows, browns and a little bit of black on a clear film to proceed in mixing the pigments with a little artist spatula. Basically, doing swatches of each of the shades. 

With each of the mixings that she’d done on the clear film, she wrote down the pigments name and the amount of each pigment that has been added. In total, I had three mixings when I found my perfect caramel brown shade. After I found the perfect shade, we even did a shade for fun which added to the experience for me. 

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The Lip expert then goes and makes the shade that you’ve picked out in a container with a flavor of your choosing (I picked wild berry) that is liquefied so it can go to a bullet mold. This mold was made out of metal which they clean before pouring the liquid. Now if you are into the “oddly satisfying” compilations on Instagram or Snapchat then this part of the experience would be your favorite. Once it’s in the mold, then it is put on top of a freezer and it freezes in seconds. After it has solidified, now it gets put in the bullet itself which makes it a lipstick. To even add more of a personalized touch, they can add engraving up to four letters to it like I did; I chose my initials “KNM”. Then you are done, you have a custom lipstick!

The Location and Entering the Lip Lab

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**Tip before entering Lip Lab: The one tip I suggest before going to your appointment is knowing the importance of the services they offer. The prices of each of the services range from $40-$120 so consider your budget and how much you are willing to spend. My lipstick service was priced at about $60 since the Bespoke service was making your own lipstick shade.**

After I made my reservation about a week before, they sent a confirmation email about all the information I needed to know about my appointment time and place. They do give you a grace period if you ever are running late or if you can’t make your appointment right away. The Lip Lab is located on Prince Street in the downtown area of the city. Now, I’ve haven’t been to Prince Street in while and I wasn’t aware of the different cross streets that were there. It felt like I was experiencing these streets for the first time; tourist status if you will. Even though I had Google Maps to help me out- I was still a lost puppy but I eventually found it a couple minutes after my appointment time.

The experience is definitely worth trying! For more information about making reservations and the different services, visit www.bitebeauty.com/lip-lab. Would you guys ever go to the Lip Lab?

Sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/fashion/At-Lip-Lab-in-SoHo-perfect-lip-shades-created-by-you.html

https://nuvomagazine.com/magazine/winter-2013/bite-beauty

Photos taken by me// There were more pictures of the swatches on me but it didn’t come out right when I was formatting this post.