Tips for Making Lip Products Less Sheer

Sometimes, all you need is some transparent shimmer. And sometimes, you need knockout color—after all, if you’re going to do it, do it. If getting the right pigment intensity is a struggle for you, these tips for making lip products less sheer can make them a bold success.

Add More Color

It sounds like a no-brainer, but be careful: The more ingredients you add, the more you have to compensate for texture. Add too much liquid dye tint, and the watery formula might end up looking like drool. Add too much powder pigment, and your lips will feel like sandpaper. Iron oxides are a good source of color, so they’re a good place to start if you want more intensity; try red, yellow, brown, black, and sienna. Warning: Make sure whatever you’re using is safe for lips. The three ingredients not approved for lips in the United States are chromium oxide, iron blue, and ferric ferrocyanide.

Try Titanium Dioxide

Beauty enthusiasts love titanium dioxide when they need to make a product opaquer. In fact, it’s the same ingredient that makes white paint opaque. It’s not a perfect solution, though. While your color will become less sheer, it will also get lighter. When you add more color to offset that, you’ll have the same problem with texture: too watery or too gritty.

Use More Effective Pigments

If you find yourself going back and forth with botanical tints and mineral pigments, you might need a product that’s specifically for lip gloss. These powders have a larger percentage of pigment, so you’ll find it easier to control texture. When you start with colorants like No Problama’s lip gloss pigment powder, you don’t need to add as much as you would with other tints. In addition, you can choose a powder that has other built-in effects from the start—glittery, holographic, pearlescent, metallic, neon, and even duochrome, which can give your lip gloss a “color traveling” quality with two colors like red and violet.

The more cosmetics you make, the more you’ll discover your own tips for making lip products less sheer. Try as many colorants as you can in the beginning to see for yourself how they affect your formulas. No Prob-Llama has a large selection of additives, so you can experiment with endless possibilities. Check out our collections, and keep making the world a glossier place.