Your Insider Guide to Skin-Tastic Ingredients: Peptides, Vitamins & Where To Source Them + A Little Tip on Where To Manufacture Color Cosmetics in Small Quantities!
Over here at So Susan Cosmetics, we believe that your makeup should work twice as hard for you. From the very beginning, our mission was always to incorporate skin-loving, vitamin-enriched ingredients into our formulations in order to create what we call “Double Duty Beauty” – colors that perform in a base formulation that helps fight skin fatigue, hydrates and soothes all at the same time!
For all cosmetics entrepreneurs and DIY-ers out there, there’s a huge amount of resources right at your fingertips. When we first started the business, we hired a chemist from an Italian contract manufacturer part time (to this day, we honestly don’t know if his employers actually knew he was taking on additional work on a freelance basis!). He would make a 10kg batch of our serum-based foundations for us, incorporating a great range of effective peptides and we’d fill it into glass pump bottles. SKS Bottle is a great place to start if you’re trying to source for these glass bottles as they carry a nice range of colors from clear, to amber, to blue and green bottles.
We’re going to disclose some of our favorite suppliers, we personally think they’re great whether you’re making a small batch for your own personal use, or need a reliable source for more commercialized manufacturing:
Lotioncrafter - makes a great variety of skin-activated ingredients, including really hard-to-find ones by European laboratories. We’ve sourced lots of amazing vitamins, ceramides and emollients from them, and love how they not only list (in complete detail) what each ingredient is for, but also provides Fact Sheets, Technical Literature and Formulation Recipes for most of them.
Making Cosmetics - has recently started to put together kits (such as their highly effective 20% Vitamin C Serum Kit) which is great for first-timers and DIY-ers. They’ve got a how-to video section, albeit a really small one (which probably needs some updating!), but supplies us with bulk botanical ingredients without a hitch every single time.
When we need Asian herbs & extracts such as Green Tea, Gotu Kola, and Boswella Resin (a super ingredient which we’re still trying to formulate in an efficacious percentage in our colors), Bulk Actives is our go-to resource. They do supply in much larger quantities (for contract or commercial manufacturing) if you were to get in direct touch with them.
Here’s a little tip on how you may be able to get your color cosmetics formulated at a fraction of the standard minimum quantities of 3000 – 5000 pieces per shade. Make Up My Cosmetics is production facility located in San Diego, USA which not only supplies private label pieces, but also does a fill of only 500 pieces per shade if you were looking to get a little more serious about your business. A little bird tells us that they’ve done work for Gerard Cosmetics.
Happy formulating & here’s to living life passionately, colorfully, doing what you love always!