Everyone has a heart for beauty, especially for most women, the pursuit of beauty has never stopped, which also makes cosmetics more and more popular. Among all cosmetics, the most eye-catching is lipstick, a lipstick can change a makeup, enhance the color and even the aura.
Most of today's lipsticks are made of synthetic pigments as raw materials, but these ingredients are generally not good for the human body, especially some of the inferior lipsticks even contain harmful substances. But in fact, there is a natural lipstick raw material in the world that is absolutely safe, and it is still an insect, which is the cochineal worm.
Red is the color of the largest wavelength of light among the seven visible colors. In fact, there was a lot of red matter that humans encountered earlier. For example, blood, red iron ore, cinnabar, etc. Some reds, due to poor stability, are not widely used. Of all mineral pigments, most of them are stable at room temperature and are therefore widely used. The most commonly used are hematite and cinnabar.
However, due to the mercury toxicity of cinnabar, this red color is actually very harmful to people's bodies. In fact, many flowers in nature are also red, and the fruit produced by many plants after flower failure is edible, so it is less toxic. At this point, people often use the flowers of plants as red pigments for dyeing. The most commonly used is rouge.
In fact, the cochineal flower itself is slightly thin as red, so the ancients, on the basis of a large number of practices, crushed the red pigments such as cochineal, gardenia, and rose, and mixed with osmanthus oil, and finally became a rouge powder or rouge cream that can be used to wipe the face.
In addition to the flowers of natural plants that can be used as red pigment, red pigment can also be extracted from animals. The cosmetic lipstick that people use every day is the red pigment extracted from a kind of cochineal worm.
Cochineals are important economic insects from the West that were later brought to Mexico by the Spaniards. Carmine extracted from cochineal can basically be sold at the price of gold in the early days. Therefore, the Spaniards once kept it a secret and falsely claimed that the pigment came from plant extracts.
Delicious cochineal pink
Structure of carmine
Later, under the observation of the inventor of the microscope, the Dutchman Anthony Leeuwenhoek, the difference between this cochineal pink and the plant-derived under the microscope was discovered. At this point, the French also discovered this magical insect that can produce red pigments, so they also cultivated it in large quantities in their colonies. Today, China introduced the cochineal worm around 2000 and has also begun to be cultivated and produced in large quantities. Structurally, this is a nitrogen-containing heterocyclic compound with ester bonds attached. Therefore, the author judges that this carmine is particularly afraid of alkali, and under weak acid or neutral conditions, it can be stable in nature. In fact, the food we eat is basically acidic (the skin egg is alkaline because it is lime fired), so this carmine pigment can be used as an edible coloring.
At present, the international market for cochineal has reached 530/kg, equivalent to more than 3K. One gram is almost 3.8. Most of the lipstick net content is about 3g, 1g lipstick powder can almost make 6 lipsticks, low-grade lipstick prices are roughly below 50, mid-range prices are almost 50---100, high-end almost 300+, whether it is the lipstick of that grade, a lipstick can earn back the cost of carmine.
There is a lot of breeding in the market, but now the price of cochineal is low. If you have strong hands-on ability, you can also make your own carmine, buy your own carmine made of cochineal on the Internet, and you can buy 50-100g for a dozen. A lipstick is made entirely of carmine (it is not recommended to make your own lipstick, the process is simple, and it is easy to cause safety hazards. ）
In summary, the use of high-grade lipsticks without cochineals is all considered in terms of commodity production to make a choice, rather than the more expensive lipsticks will use cochineals.
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