A few years ago, Mink shot to fame by offering a 3D printer that could print coloured makeup at the comfort of your own home. However, at that time, there were huge issues with Mink’s feasibility. Fast forward to today and you will see that Mink no longer touts its game-changing 3D makeup printer. It has pivoted into a DIY “makeup hacker” kit. This is a far cry from an machine that would automatically produce coloured makeup, to now a kit where you have to manually measure out and mix the pigment into the makeup substrate yourself.
Grace Choi, the brains behind Mink, appears to have released the Mink Pen as the successor to the 3D makeup printer, but the predecessor of the makeup hacker kit. The Mink Pen can no longer be found anywhere. It has a companion app that returns the CMY (but no K) values of an image, exactly like the colour picker of any image editing software. The app promises to be able to return the exact colour values that are needed to reproduce the colour using the Mink Pen and associated inks. This is a difficult promise to make good on and it shares the same issues as the Mink 3D Printer, which have already been discussed to great lengths here and here.