The beauty industry is a multi-billion dollar one, and it does take a certain amount of know-how in order to make a splash in this highly competitive, albeit rewarding and lucrative industry. Grace Choi was at Harvard Business School when she decided that she would do something to introduce a disruption in the beauty industry. After doing her fair bit of research, she realized that beauty brands create prior to marking up their products by a whole lot through the mixing of plenty of colors.
Choi shared at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this week, “The makeup industry makes a whole lot of money on a whole lot of bulls**t. They charge a huge premium on something that tech provides for free. That one thing is color.”
Choi is referring to widely available color printers that anyone can own, where the ink used would be the same kind of ink that makeup companies use in their products. According to Choi, this ink has also been approved by the FDA. This has led her to develop a mini home printer known as Mink which will cost $300 a pop, enabling just about anyone to print their own makeup after obtaining the color code off color photos on the Internet.
In her demonstration, Choi first selected a color that she would like to print (her machine churns out creamy lipsticks or powdery eye shadows) via the color picker, and pasted the hex code of that color from Microsoft Paint or Photoshop into a new document. Print that color in the same manner that you would do when you print a normal document on the computer, and in Choi’s demonstration, she decided to print her very own pink eye shadow.
I wonder what the beauty industry has to say about Mink – I believe that there will be some sort of counter campaign should Mink actually take off in a big way.
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