Hip Hop x Lipstick

PhotoCredit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times

I love reading stories of Nigerians outside of the country that are doing great things. While researching, I came across this article about Florence Adepoju, the founder of MDMflow. MDMFlow is a brand of lipsticks that are handmade and rose-scented and come in shades like juicy orange, emerald green and brilliant blue.

PhotoCredit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times
PhotoCredit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times

In her interview with NYtimes (How amazing is that!) Ms. Adepoju talks about being inspired by HipHop:

Milkshake, a blueish-pink named for a Kelis song, is frequently sold out. So is a bright blue called Mas Marina. MDMflow, so named because it was the only permutation of Ms. Adepoju’s nickname, Madame Flow, still available on Twitter, is now sold at Topshop Oxford Circus, Colette in Paris and the website Nasty Gal (where the lipsticks cost $18 each).

“We liked that she created the brand she always wanted,” said Guillaume Salmon, a Colette spokesman. “It’s the accumulation of all her obsessions, and the glamour associated with mid-’90s hip-hop culture.”

What’s cool about this brand, is that Ms. Adepoju makes it herself;

Ms. Adepoju makes the lipsticks, 30 at a time, in a shed in her parents’ garden. (“It does have heat,” she said.) To fill big orders, she stays up all night, melting wax and mixing pigments. Recently, she introduced a mascara and will soon do a contour kit because, she said, “I’m obsessed with it, and it’s an urban look.”

Her small-batch process has allowed for happy accidents of the kind unlikely to pass muster at a big cosmetics company. When she was trying to make Milkshake, the pink, she experimented with encapsulating a red pigment in a white pigment, and discovered that the shade becomes brighter the more you rub it (or rub your lips together) because the red is being released. She gave the results to friends and figured she’d start over, but they liked being able to tweak the hue.

The mustard yellow, one of several limited-edition colors she introduces from time to time, was the byproduct of trying to make molten gold. The shade was called Two Chains because she was listening to the rapper 2 Chainz when she made it.

Read more of her interview Here, and discover the brand here