What's In A Lipstick??

During Beth & Stacie's visit, we decided go to Dallas and tour Mary Kay's manufacturing plant. On their website, it described the tour and it sounded very interesting (on 'the line', they call lipsticks "bullets" because they look like bullets......but we didn't get to see any on our tour) and I will admit - I'm a 'tour junkie'!

It was very interesting to see the other side of the make-up world - the more industrial side. Here is a worker getting a 'batch' ready for the mixers. They have a special area in their warehouse that is for measuring out ingredients. If they are going to make foundation, they will measure out each ingredient for that batch of foundation and then put it all on a pallet for that production cycle. Here's a picture of a worker taping up a pallet of all of the ingredients for a batch of lotion:

Here is the label on a big barrel of "work-in-progress" Day Lotion w/SPF 15!

They have laboratories in the plant where scientists take samples of each batch and test it chemically to make sure it's uniform with their standards.

And if you ever wondered how mascara is made....at Mary Kay, machines fill the mascara tubes, but an actual person sticks the brush/applicator into each tube manually (see below)!

And here is the end of the mascara line - they are coming out of the 'boxing machine' and are being put into packages to ship out.

Here is the cologne department - they are filling perfume bottles and they are manually screwing on the sprayer caps just to the right of where this picture was taken.

Here is a picture of the pump-putter-iner machine with some sort of lotion/moisturizer bottles!

This is Stacie, Beth & I by the foundation vats!

Some finished product moisturizer - straight off the assembly line!

One of the most annoying/hilarious parts of the tour was a renegade beauty consultant named Janet Jones that basically was SOOOO obnoxiously excited about the product and the company that I thought she might actually explode from her enthusiasm! Now, when you think of Mary Kay beauty consultants, you usually picture women that are dressed to the nines and totally made up perfectly with Mary Kay products, right? Well, this woman was very odd personality-wise, but on top of that, she literally had NO makeup on, hadn't combed her hair (Beth coined her 'hairstyle' as a 'rooster tail'), was wearing casual clothes with a floor-length black wool coat, along with royal blue/black WATER SHOES! Yes, I'm serious, AQUA SHOES! REALLY?! After the tour, we couldn't stop talking about crazy Janet Jones - it was absolutely hilarious!