What's New at TKB Trading

Lip products are essentially a blend of oil and wax. To that, we add color.

The 3 kinds of color products used in lipstick includes: dyes, pigments and mica.

When you think "dyes", think "food dye", because it is essentially the same thing. The good thing about dyes is that they are very intense and they actually stain the lips, making the color last longer. The down side is that most dyes are...

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Making Salt Crystal Potpourri is a simple process. The trickiest part is the coloring of the crystals. You have 3 choices for colorings: Liquid Based, Glycerin Based or Mica Powders. The liquid based colorings will dry the best, glycerin will be a nice translucent coloring and Mica gives you...

06/22/06 UPDATE. After posting this, I received an email from a woman who had followed our link to Ada Cosmetics in order to make a purchase. Her experience was frustrating and she asked me to advise potential customers of that fact. While her money was refunded on a lost or never sent shipment, the process of communicating with the company was not to her satisfaction and she felt it was...

Adjusting a product's color as a last step in processing is not uncommon at all -- people in industry do it all the time. It's kind of the nature of the business.

The first step is to first figure out in what way a the color of your product is off. The big guys use computers and sensors for this and have very precise ways of measuring hue. We have to depend on our eyeballs and a good sense of...

As suppliers of raw materials, we try to make sure that our products are consistent batch to batch. But that doesn't mean that we always succeed. Once we received 100 pounds of a brown oxide which was definitely more red than the "old brown". Another time, we received a titanium dioxide white which was heavier than the "old white".

The result in both cases was frustration for our customers who...

Recently, a customer asked me this question:

I am creating a line of "multi purpose mineral cosmetics" with micas.
Let's say one of the colored micas contains mica, titanium dioxide, iron oxides, and ferric ferrocyanide. Does the ferric ferrocyanide have to be listed on the ingredients list?? Is that considered something that would be a "trace" ingredient, and therefore I'm not required to list it??...

Recently, a customer asked me this question:

I am creating a line of "multi purpose mineral cosmetics" with micas.
Let's say one of the colored micas contains mica, titanium dioxide, iron oxides, and ferric ferrocyanide. Does the ferric ferrocyanide have to be listed on the ingredients list?? Is that considered something that would be a "trace" ingredient, and therefore I'm not required to list it??...

Recently, a customer asked me this question:

I am creating a line of "multi purpose mineral cosmetics" with micas.
Let's say one of the colored micas contains mica, titanium dioxide, iron oxides, and ferric ferrocyanide. Does the ferric ferrocyanide have to be listed on the ingredients list?? Is that considered something that would be a "trace" ingredient, and therefore I'm not required to list it??...

MSDS stands for "Material Safety Data Sheet". People often think that a MSDS sheet is an ingredients list. While it does disclose ingredients, this is not its purpose. Its purpose is to be an instruction sheet on how to safely handle the product.

The MSDS gives information such as "What do I do if I accidentally eat it, or get it into my eyes, or inhale it?" Or, "What do I do if I accidentally...