spending some time in the lab

a couple of weeks ago, the old lady asked me to clear my calendar for a fun outing out on the west side.  she asked me if i wanted it to be a surprise or if i wanted to know what we were doing, and because we all know how impatient i am, i chose option b.  she showed me a post from one of the makeup gurus she follows on instagram, who'd shared her visit to bite beauty's lip lab in NYC.  the best way to describe it is like build-a-bear for grown-ups - you get to create your own custom lipstick shade, have it poured and molded and you even get to name your special shade.  so fun, right?  we were both super excited to check it out.

our appointment was right at noon when the shop opened.

we were greeted by sam, who showed us to our seats at the bar, explained the process to us and asked us what kind of shades we were interested in creating.

the old lady went first, requesting a nice peachy-nude color she could wear on a daily basis.  sam pulled a couple of colors to work with and then using this chart to measure them out and mix them together.

you also get to choose your finish - matte, creamy, satin, sheer.  she added one more component to the color and then swiped it onto a disposable applicator to try it on.  while the old lady got to work on applying her first color, sam got to work on making my everyday shade.  

both of our first shades were a little lighter than we liked, and so she got to work on a second try for us.  and then our third shade was a bolder look - i'd explained to her that i've always wanted to find a red lipstick that i felt comfortable wearing, but that every shade i've tried thus far makes me feel a little clownish.  she seemed to know exactly what i was looking for and pulled out three colors to mix up for me.

i guess you can't really see the differences between the swatches here, but these are the three colors that were made for me:

the last piece of the puzzle was to choose a flavor for our lipstick.  she handed us each a box containing nine little vials of flavors - cherry, lime, coconut, vanilla, mint, fresh citrus, citrus mint, violet, and wild berry.

here's a slightly better look at our custom colors.  

while sam got to work on mixing the proper quantities of our chosen shades, we wandered around the shop.

 of course, we took advantage of the selfie station while wearing our bolder, "going out" lip colors.

once the colors had been assembled in special vials, sam placed them in what looked like a microwave to melt it down.  then she put it in this contraption, which gave it a good stir for about a minute to mix it all together.

this was the mold that she poured the finished product into:

and then she placed the mold on a cooled surface for six minutes to completely solidify.  when the time was up, she pulled off the top half of the mold and it looked like this:

and then she carefully placed the lipsticks into their cases.  here's mine:

she'd used this machine to engrave the names of our lip colors onto the lipstick lids:

here's what i named my neutral, everyday lip color.  what'd you expect?

we took one more picture together before we left:

and now we both have lipstick colors we love and will be happy to wear anytime.  the cool thing about this is that we can reorder it anytime since they keep it on file, and also gave us cards with the exact formulations of our colors by name.  and we had a lot of fun in the process!  it's a win all the way around.