From formula to filled bottle
Every shade takes the same five steps, whether it is a repeat of a colour we have poured thirty times or a trial that never leaves the studio.
Formulation
A shade starts as a written formula: base, pigment load, flake percentage. Nothing is mixed by eye.
Dispersion
Pigment is milled into a small quantity of base until no grain remains, then let down into the full batch.
Swatch trials
Every trial batch is painted on plastic tips at one, two and three coats and read in daylight and lamp light.
Roll
Bottles rest on a roller for ten days so pigment and suspension settle into a stable mix before they are sold.
Fill and label
Bottles are filled and labelled by hand, in runs of about forty, and the batch code goes on the base.
The 10 things our base leaves out
The phrase 10-free is used loosely across the industry, so here is exactly what it means on our cartons.
- formaldehyde
- formaldehyde resin
- toluene
- dibutyl phthalate
- camphor
- TPHP
- xylene
- ethyl tosylamide
- parabens
- animal-derived ingredients
Pigments are checked against the same list. Two red flakes we liked were dropped in 2019 because the supplier could not confirm they were free of animal-derived carmine.
Equipment, in full
| Stage | What we use |
|---|---|
| Dispersion | A bench three-roll mill for pigment paste, cleaned between colour families |
| Mixing | Stainless beakers on a magnetic stirrer, batch weighed rather than measured by volume |
| Rolling | A twelve-bottle roller running continuously for ten days per batch |
| Filling | A gravity filler with a glass reservoir; caps torqued by hand and checked on a gauge |
| Labelling | Printed in-house in sheets of forty, batch code and fill date added last |
What a trial batch looks like
A new shade starts at 60 ml, which fills four bottles. Those four go onto tips at one, two and three coats, and are read at a north window in the morning and under a 4000K lamp at night. Most trials fail on the third coat, where a colour that looked clean at two coats turns muddy or shows brush drag.
If a trial passes it is repeated at full batch size before it goes on the index, because pigment behaves differently at forty-bottle volume than it does in a beaker. Roughly a third of trials never get that far.
Why bottles carry a batch code
Two bottles of the same shade from different pours are not identical. They are close — that is the point of weighing rather than eyeballing — but a flake percentage that lands at 4.1 instead of 4.0 is visible side by side on the same hand. The code on the base tells you which pour a bottle came from, and we keep a written record of every one.