This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .

Grace Choi Mink

Grace Choi  Grace Choi

Grace Choi was at Harvard Business School when she decided to disrupt the beauty industry. She did a little research and realized that beauty brands create and then majorly mark up their products by mixing lots of colors.

"The makeup industry makes a whole lot of money on a whole lot of bulls---," Choi said at TechCrunch Disrupt this week. "They charge a huge premium on something that tech provides for free. That one thing is color."

By that, she means color printers are available to everyone, and the ink they have is the same as the ink that makeup companies use in their products. She says the ink is FDA-approved.

Choi created her own mini home 3D printer, Mink, that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the internet. It hooks up to a computer, just like a normal printer.

She demonstrated how it works, then brushed some of the freshly printed makeup onto her hand. She answered a lot of the tough questions about how she'll move beyond powders to creamier products and team up with traditional printing companies in the video below.

Here's how Mink, Choi's makeup-printing machine, works.

This is the Mink printer. It uses regular printer ink.

3d makeup printer

Screenshot

First, find a color you want to print. Choi says her machine will print creamy lipsticks or powdery eye shadows.

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

Use the color picker to copy the hex code of the color you've chosen. In this demo, Choi chose pink.

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

Using Photoshop or Microsoft Paint, paste the hex code into a new document. You'll see the color you want to print pop up.

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

Print the color just as you'd print any other document on your computer.

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

Here's Choi printing the pink eye shadow.

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

This is what the finished product looks like. It comes in a little Mink-provided container that looks just like eye shadow.

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

Choi dips a makeup brush in the freshly printed powder to show it really is makeup.

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

Then she brushes the pink on her hand. "Mink enables the web to become the biggest beauty store in the world," says Choi. "We’re going to live in a world where you can take a picture of your friend’s lipstick and print it out."

Mink makeup demo

TechCrunch Disrupt

Now check out the video demo and listen to Choi answer tough questions about how she'll bring the printer to market below:

Read next

Alyson is the Editor-in-Chief and CCO at Fortune.  She was previously a co Editor-in-Chief overseeing Business Insider's tech and business coverage.She joined Business Insider in July 2008 as the company's sixth employee. She started as a sales planner before joining the editorial team in 2010, where she became a startup reporter and was first to cover some of today's largest tech companies, including Pinterest, Tinder, Instagram, Uber and Snap. Alyson rose to become a senior correspondent, then Executive Editor.She was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Business Insider in 2016, at which point she became the youngest and only woman to run a global business publication. Under her leadership, the business division has grown to hundreds of  millions of monthly readers.Alyson was a host of  Insider's conferences and launched a podcast, "Success! How I Did It," where she interviewed influencers ranging from Sheryl Sandberg to Steve Ballmer about their career paths (subscribe on iTunes here).She has appeared on ABC, Good Morning America, Al Jazeera, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and CBC, and she has interviewed media personalities such as Megyn Kelly, technology leaders like Fred Wilson, political leaders like John Brennan, and sports star LeBron James. She is a judge for the prestigious Gerald Loeb Awards in business journalism, and has been named one of Min's Rising Stars in Media, as well as Folio's 2017 Top Women in Media.She graduated from Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Public Communications, where she majored in psychology and advertising.You can read some of her investigative articles here:— Leaked videos reveal the true founding story of Snapchat— The founder who dumped Jared Kushner: Inside the phone call that left the White House star in a fit of rage— The downfall of billion-dollar startup, Fab— How a startup that raised the largest seed round in Silicon Valley history blew itself up before it even launched— The dark side of Facebook, where people lie, cheat, and make millions— A profile of Uber's controversial CEO, Travis Kalanick— The mystery of Jody Sherman, a founder who was driven to suicide and left behind a shocking business disasterDisclosure: Alyson owns bitcoin and Snap. She is also an investor in The Spun, a sports-media startup founded by her husband.