A word on the use of metallic paints.



        Once upon a time, not too long ago, if you wanted to use a gold pigment, you got an oil-based paint, or dry metallic pigment, and made the old rubber cement based paint out of it.

If you used this paint on a latex mask, it’s days were numbered. It would rot very quickly. Why?:


The main reason this rotted latex is that many metals, especially brass (which is very gold-like) attack rubber. Most of these pigments were aluminum or brass based.

Actually if you mixed aluminum powder and water, and sealed the container it was in, the mix would create carbon dioxide and could explode the container! As a result, these metal pigments were always used in an oil base paint. So actually you had the worst of both worlds: brass and oil-based solvents!


The long and short of it is that the newer acrylic paints (water-based) have no metals or oils which can attack rubber.  The pigments are mica based. These are virtually as bright as the old oil-based colors, but are MUCH safer for your masks.