Ingredients beginning with M

A red from the root of Rubia tinctorum whose principal colourant, alizarin, became the first natural dye to be manufactured synthetically, and so ended its own cultivation.

Malachite is a green copper carbonate mineral, ground on stone palettes into the green eye paint of Predynastic and Old Kingdom Egypt, and one of the earliest cosmetic colours that can be named as a specific substance.

The shortest-chain member of the paraben family, in use as a cosmetic and pharmaceutical preservative since the 1920s and still permitted in the European Union at up to 0.4 per cent.

A platy potassium aluminium silicate that splits into flakes thin enough to be transparent, supplying the shimmer in most eyeshadows and the substrate for nearly every pearlescent pigment.