DIY Cosmetics: The Crucible Collection

I recently got access to a lot of TKB's micas and pigments, so I thought I'd review them here. For the first in this series, I'm reviewing their Metallic Collection. TKB Trading's Metallic Collection is a collection of "pure metallic pigments (no mica, no titanium dioxide, no iron oxides or dyes)." Depending on the amount you buy, they cost about  $ 0.19-0.28/g individually, or $ 0.17-0.25/g as a set of 4.

These are the colours in the collection:

Crucible Gold

• Ingredients: Bronze Powder, Silica

Crucible Khaki

• Ingredients: Copper Powder, Zinc, Silicon Dioxide 

Crucible Red

• Ingredients: Copper Powder, Silicon Dioxide

Forged Gold

• Ingredients: Copper Powder, Zinc, Silicon Dioxide

These colours are approved for use on lips, eyes, and face, so you can pretty much use it all over your face. Another great thing about these colours is that they're really great on their own. You can pretty much use them on their own as eyeshadows, and they adhere well on their own, even without a base.

Here are arm swatches:

Under natural light, over Eccentric Cosmetics' primer

Under natural light
Left: Over bare skin
Right: Over Eccentric Cosmetics' primer

As you can see from the side by side swatches of these colours over primer and bare skin, while a primer do give them more of a vibrant shine, they look pretty good without a primer too!

You can also easily mix them up with a clear polish to great gorgeous colours:

Mixed with Sally Hansen's base coat, photographed under natural light

You can either dust them on your lips for some colour, or mix them up with Vaseline/lip balm/TKB's lipstick base/Life's Entropy's Placebo to create a lipstick/lip gloss. Here are swatches of the colours mixed with Vaseline:

Face swatches for the lips!

So now, DIY time...let's take a look at how they affect eyeshadow blends. These metallic colours create a sort of metallic "duochrome" effect. It makes any eyeshadow look sooo luxurious!

I've mixed them into some existing eyeshadows I have, and here are swatches of the original eyeshadow (top) + the Crucible micas (bottom) so you can get a rough idea of how these pigments change your formulations:

Under natural light, over Eccentric Cosmetics' primer

Under natural light, over Eccentric Cosmetics' primer

Here's some of the crafting tips I have for these:

• These pigments are pretty opaque on their own, so they're great for making sheer eyeshadows more opaque and fixing patchy eyeshadows. 

• They do darken the colours so watch out for that.

• As you can see, the effect's rather lost on browns, and it's most dramatic against a darker base. You can still create ethereal looks with lighter colours though. 

• I personally prefer something in between a 1:2 - 1:1 ratio for Crucibles:Colour. Since these pigments are pretty opaque on their own, if you have too much of them, they tend to dominate the colour and you'll end up with mostly metallic gold/red.

• You can mix these into duochrome eyeshadows and still see the duochrome shift, but you'll probably need to add in more of the duochrome highlight if you want a more dramatic shift.

So there you have it! Hope you have as much fun with these pigments as I did!