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06/22/06 UPDATE. After posting this, I received an email from a woman who had followed our link to Ada Cosmetics in order to make a purchase. Her experience was frustrating and she asked me to advise potential customers of that fact. While her money was refunded on a lost or never sent shipment, the process of communicating with the company was not to her satisfaction and she felt it was completely unprofessional. So . . . . now that you have read my warning, here is the original post: A new line of mineral makeup catering to the ethnic market has been announced. Please visit www.adacosmetics.com to view their 18 unique foundation shades and other products. I don't know the owner of this company, but I wish her well. It is a market that is definitely underserved with regard to the mineral makeup products. Be sure to visit our site at http://www.wholesalecolors.com/ (or http://www.tkbtrading.com/ ).

Adjusting a product's color as a last step in processing is not uncommon at all -- people in industry do it all the time. It's kind of the nature of the business. The first step is to first figure out in what way a the color of your product is off. The big guys use computers and sensors for this and have very precise ways of measuring hue. We have to depend on our eyeballs and a good sense of color. Here is what we do at TKB Trading, but it is not the only way to handle things. Let's say we make a foundation which has a very simple recipe of: 10 grams titanium dioxide white, 20 grams sericite mica, 4 grams yellow oxide, 1 gram red oxide (this is just for discussion, please don't run out and make this foundation as I have no idea what it will look like). The "Base" of this recipe is the titanium dioxide and the mica. The "Color" is the yellow and red. We start by mixing together the base ingredients. Typically, we will mix more than what we need (in t...

As suppliers of raw materials, we try to make sure that our products are consistent batch to batch. But that doesn't mean that we always succeed. Once we received 100 pounds of a brown oxide which was definitely more red than the "old brown". Another time, we received a titanium dioxide white which was heavier than the "old white". The result in both cases was frustration for our customers who found their finished products were "off-color" as a result. (In the industry, we call this being "Off-Spec", short for "Off Specification"). Receiving raw materials which are Off-Spec is not as uncommon as you think. So, I recommend that when you come up with a formula you like, you make a point of keeping samples of each of the raw materials used in the formula, as well as a sample of the finished product. Label these and set them aside in a safe place so that you can refer to them in the event that you run into problems. The day that you fin...