Cosmetics Manufacturing: Lipstick Moulds to ABB Robots

Before a lipstick reaches a shop it has been melted, moulded, flamed, fitted into its case and packed. Cosmetics manufacturing started as hand work in small rooms, and today its plants rely on fast, hygienic automation. This post follows that path: hand poured lipstick and the first metal cases, the filling machines that followed, and the robots now filling, assembling and packing beauty products at plants such as Estée Lauder's Whitman site in England. It also looks at where ABB robots like the IRB 360 FlexPicker and YuMi fit, and what the industry still has to solve.

Pink lipsticks standing upright in their metal cases. Photo: Evi Michailidou / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

From hand poured lipstick to filling machines

Guerlain in Paris sold one of the first commercial lipsticks in 1884. It was made from deer tallow, castor oil and beeswax and came wrapped in silk paper. The case quickly mattered as much as the stick. Push up metal containers were sold in Europe from 1911, and by 1915 lipstick was commonly sold in metal cylinders. In 1923 James Bruce Mason Jr. of Nashville, Tennessee, patented the first swivel up tube, the basic design still used on most lipsticks today. From then on, every lipstick also needed a small mechanism to be assembled.

A modern lipstick with its cap off, built on the swivel up case patented in 1923. Photo: Sjr / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The recipe steps are still recognisable today. Ingredients are ground and heated, waxes are added for texture, and oils follow as the formula requires. The hot liquid is poured into metal moulds and chilled. Once hard, each stick is passed through a flame for about half a second to give it a shiny finish. In the 1940s, women at Colgate-Palmolive's factory in Balmain, Sydney, poured lipstick into rows of moulds by hand. Later in that decade, the chemist Hazel Bishop created a long lasting "No-Smear" lipstick and founded her own company in 1950.

Women pouring and finishing lipsticks by hand at Colgate-Palmolive in Balmain, Sydney, in the 1940s. Photo: State Library of New South Wales via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Creams, lotions and mascaras brought their own machines. Tube filling machines dose a measured amount into each tube and seal its end, first semi-automatically with an operator loading tubes, later on fully automatic lines. Packing stayed manual for much longer. At Geka Brush, a mascara packaging maker in Bechhofen, Bavaria, founded in 1925 as a brush maker, finished mascara caps used to drop onto a conveyor at the end of the assembly line, where an operator sorted them into boxes by hand, two or three at a time.

A small semi-automatic tube filling machine from Gustav Obermeyer. Photo: Twrichter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Robots on today's beauty lines

On August 26, 2026, Supply Chain Digital described Estée Lauder's Whitman site in Petersfield, England. Opened in 1966, it makes more than 90 million products a year, mostly Jo Malone London and skincare, with 1,200 people working three shifts. Some lines are entirely automated, with products filled and assembled by robots and checked by vision systems. One collaborative robot that helps with heavy lifting is nicknamed JoBot. The company says it has spent more than US$72 million on automation, advanced manufacturing and sustainability at Whitman since 2020, and on October 5 it announced a €5.7 million water project at its Oevel plant in Belgium.

A tube filling and sealing machine of the kind used for creams and lotions. Photo: Adwebsmedia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB robots have been in cosmetics packing for years. At Geka Brush, machine builder Kühne+Vogel built a cell around an ABB IRB 340 FlexPicker with an IRC5 controller, delivered in February 2007. The robot picks finished mascara caps, lays them on a rack and places them in boxes, and it tells other machines to add a separating sheet and swap full boxes for empty ones. According to ABB's case study, output on that line rose from 23,000 to 30,000 caps per shift, and staffing fell from 1.3 to 0.3 people per line without job cuts.

Finished mascara caps on a rack at Geka Brush, where an ABB FlexPicker packs them into boxes. Photo: ABB

The IRB 360 FlexPicker, the successor to that robot, is built for small, light items moving fast, and with PickMaster vision it can pick products that arrive in random positions. At Gerresheimer in Essen, which makes glass bottles and jars for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, ABB robots take bottles off the cooling conveyors and an IRB 6700 palletizes them, as we described in our post on beauty and cosmetics. For gift sets and small runs, a dual arm YuMi could be a possibility, since it was designed for small parts work next to people.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

Where cosmetics manufacturing goes next

Beauty brands launch many products in small batches, so lines need to change over quickly. Superga Beauty, for example, said on October 6 that it will invest about €15 million by 2030 in its Reims plant in France. The first €3 million phase covers weighing, mixing and filling, including ISO 8 clean areas and four tube filling lines for sensitive products. Flexible robot cells fit this pattern well, because one arm can be reprogrammed for a new jar or cap far more easily than a dedicated machine can be rebuilt.

ABB robots handling glass bottles at Gerresheimer in Essen, which makes glass for cosmetics and pharma. Photo: ABB

Shoppers mostly notice this on the shelf. Faster changeovers make limited editions and refills cheaper to produce, and vision checks catch scratched cases or crooked labels before they ship. Water is becoming a factory issue too. At Oevel, Estée Lauder expects its new system to cut water use from 9.3 to 3.6 litres per kilogram of product and save about 25 million litres a year. I would expect automated cleaning between batches to become part of the same effort.

ABB's dual arm YuMi handling small parts beside a worker. Photo: ABB

Handling is the first difficulty. Glossy cases, glass and metallic caps scratch easily, so grippers must be soft and precise. Hundreds of product variants make programming expensive, which is why many lines are planned and tested first in RobotStudio. When cobots such as JoBot share space with staff, they need speed and force limits like those ABB sets with SafeMove. Then there are people. Whitman runs apprenticeships and STEM programmes with local universities, since a plant full of robots still depends on technicians who can keep them running.

A violet lipstick and its black cap, the kind of glossy case that grippers must not scratch. Photo: Arienne McCracken / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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