One of the most pervasive criticisms of the cosmetic industry is that it tests on animals. In fact, when people learn that I made cosmetics for a living a frequent question is, “do you test on animals?”

No, I’ve never tested on animals (except myself). I think this is the case for most cosmetic chemists. However, it is disingenous to say that the products are not tested on animals. Most aren’t, but nearly every raw material used in cosmetic products has been tested on animals. This is why I’m always troubled by “cruelty free” claims. Everyone is “cruelty free.”

Anyway, the bad press, bad public opinion, high cost and scientist’s genuine desire to minimize the number of animals which get tested on has led to the development of alternatives. These are primarily in-vitro skin cultures which can mimick human skin.

Here is one of the latest technologies that has been developed Evocutis. They have launched the first skin model for the testing of anti-microbial and pre-biotic product claims. The skin model actually simulates the epidermal and the dermal layers of skin.

It remains to be seen whether this technology will replace any real animal tests (it takes time to validate) but it certainly seems like progress.

Stay tuned for more developments in this area…

Specialchem4cosmetics.com has an upcoming online course on emulsions. I’m going to do a review after I take the course but if you are interested in signing up, here is the information. It promises to be a useful course for any cosmetic chemist.

This week there is an the upcoming e-Training Course on Emulsion Stability in Practice. Register now!

Attend this online course to better understand emulsion science and how ingredients impact product stability. It will enable you to implement effective prevention measures and solve faster instability issues (flocculation, Ostwald ripening, coalescence…).
Practical case studies on silicone emulsions and double emulsions will also be presented.

Course Objective: Help experienced formulators strengthen their ability to develop faster stable emulsions. In the light of every day practice, the following will be discussed: • Emulsion science in very accessible terms • Major instability factors • Impact of ingredients on overall stability Date: Thursday April 15, 2010 Time: 4 p.m. CET / 10 a.m. ET   Check your local time Course Details & Attendance Benefits

Covered sections:
1. Main factors ruling emulsion technology:
Bancroft rule, Interaction energies forces between droplets, HLB
2. Major instability mechanism and prevention measures:
Gravitational instability, Flocculation, Ostwald ripening, Coalescence
3. Particular cases of silicone emulsions and double emulsions
4. Role of polymeric surfactants in emulsion stabilization – examples
See Detailed Outline

Featuring Independent Speaker: Isabelle Afriat
With over 20 years of experience in cosmetics international companies like L’Oreal, Estee Lauder NY and Helena Rubinstein Laboratories, Isabelle Afriat is an independant consultant specialized in product development for the cosmetic industry.

As a cosmetic scientist your job will often involve coming up with a formula that satisfies the desires of your Marketing department. Fortunately, or unfortunately, those desires are usually satisfied by taking existing formulas, adding small amounts of ingredients to support the marketing story, and testing the formulas to make sure they are stable.

I say unfortunately, because this isn’t a very creative activity. You really aren’t fully using your skills as a chemist or inventor. If you limit yourself to these types of projects and activities, you’re going to get bored.

Fortunately, there are still unsolved problems in many areas of cosmetics. Many problems will require more than just tweaking existing formulas with story ingredients. Here are the top 10 unsolved problems in the area of hair care.

1. Hair Loss

It’s a fact of life that people lose hair. Much of this is through natural shedding which is replaced in the normal hair growth cycle. But as people get older, hair loss becomes permanent. If you can figure out how to stop hair loss or to make it start growing again, you’ll be rich.

2. Unwanted hair growth

This is the opposite problem of the first but not any less important. Nearly everyone has hair in places where they wished it wouldn’t grow. Solutions like depilatories or shaving provide short-term, temporary relief. If you can figure out how to stop hair growth you may become famous.

3. Hair going gray

Everyone goes gray and there are only two ways to handle it. Artificial hair color that has to be constantly re-applied or just let it go gray. If you can invent a way to restart natural hair color or apply color in a constant and convenient way, you could make millions or billions.

4. Hair color changes

People spend tons of money on changing their hair color but unfortunately, it changes quickly. Make a way to keep the color in people’s hair and you’ll have a product that will out-sell all competitors.

5. Bad Hair condition (feel)

?The only solution to this problem is the repeated application of condition. But if you could figure out a way to give people long lasting conditioning / excellent feeling hair you would radically change the hair care market.

6. Unruly hair – Frizzy, uncooperative

Conditioners help but they don’t stop hair from fizzing up during days of high humidity. There is still room to develop a product that really stops frizz but leaves hair feeling natural.

7. Thinning hair

Hair loss is one problem but hair thinning also happens as people get older. The thinning comes both in the thickness of the hair fibers and the number of them. Figure out how to keep hair full and your wallet will get thicker too.

8. Lack volume

A high percentage of people complain that their hair has no “volume”. These people have naturally straight hair that lays flat on their head. Figure out a way to give them more permanent volume without resorting to damaging chemical treatments like perms and waves.

9. Shine

Everyone claims they can give it to you but in reality, no product delivers a significant improvement in hair shine. Find a way to make hair shine so much it sparkles like a diamond. This would be a truly innovative product.

10. Time to Style

Last but not least is time. Some people take over an hour to get their hair into the style and shape they want. This is primarily caused by their lack of styling skill and the speed at which the hair dries. You may not be able to teach them to style faster but a scientist certainly should be able to figure out how to get hair to dry more quickly.

In a future post, we’ll go into the various strategies people have used to solve these and why they haven’t worked.

Have you worked on any of these hair problems? Was there anything we missed? Leave a comment and let us know.

I must confess. One of my favorite things about being a chemist is getting to say long words and knowing what they mean. I loved learning the IUPAC system for naming chemicals.

That’s why I found ingredient lists on shampoos & conditioners baffling. I didn’t know what most of the chemicals were. They were similar to IUPAC terms, but not quite. It turns out that the cosmetic industry doesn’t use the IUPAC naming system. Instead, they follow their own system as laid out in the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI) dictionary. This volume is produced by the main cosmetic industry trade group called the Personal Care Products Council (PCPC, formerly the CTFA but we’ll save that for another time).

List of Ingredients

The first thing to know about cosmetic ingredients is the ingredient list. In the United States, every personal care and cosmetic product is supposed to have their ingredients listed. In the business, we called it the LOI (list of ingredients). Any ingredient above 1% is required to be listed in order of concentration (by weight). At 1% or below, the ingredients can be listed in any order. Typically, preservatives and dyes are listed at the end. In a future post, we’ll show how this labeling requirement can help you formulate new products.

Any ingredient above 1% is required to be listed in order of concentration (by weight).

To be proper, companies are supposed to follow the naming conventions as laid out in the INCI.

Cosmetic Ingredient Naming Conventions

While many chemical names in the INCI seem arbitrary, there are some standard rules. The following will help you make heads or tails out of the ingredients on most LOIs. We can’t list all the conventions here, but we’ll point out the major ones and give examples.

Common Names

When they first came up with the INCI (originally called the CTFA Cosmetic Ingredient Dictionary) in 1973, many cosmetic ingredients already had names. These common names were incorporated into the dictionary even though they didn’t follow any specific naming rules. Therefore, we use Glycerin instead of the more accurate Glycerol and Menthol instead of (1R, 2S, 5R)-2-isopropyl-5-methylcyclohexanol. Common names are also used for various natural ingredients like Lanolin and Beeswax.

Stem Names

Probably the most important thing to learn about naming cosmetic ingredients is to memorize this list of hydrocarbon stem names. It’s a bit different than the IUPAC.

So, if you have a 16-carbon alcohol, you call it Cetyl Alcohol instead of Hexadecanol. For an 18-carbon acid, you would use Stearic Acid instead of Ocatdecanoic acid.

Mixtures

You’ll run into names like Cocamidopropyl Betaine that don’t match any of the stem names. This is because the raw material uses coconut oil as a starting raw material. In these cases, you use an abbreviation of that starting material. Other ones you might see include Palm Kernel oil, Soybean oil and Sunflower oil. In a future post, we’ll show the fatty acid distribution of these materials.

Derivatives

The INCI tries to follow established conventions from other systems. For example, when you want to name an ether, you take the stem names from both fatty acids and add the term ether. Thus, a molecule made with a 14-carbon and 16-carbon chains connected by an oxygen would be called Cetyl Myristyl Ether. An ester of the same molecules would be Cetyl Myristate.

Nitrogen Containing

Hydrocarbons that contain nitrogen are amides and have the phrase included in their name. Therefore, Lauramide is used to describe a 12-Carbon molecule (Lauryl) that has a NH2 group on its end. If the Nitrogen has other hydrocarbons attached, those are also named. So, Lauramide DEA would be that same 12-Carbon molecule attached to a Nitrogen which also has Ethyl groups attached to it.  When these Nitrogen containing compounds are turned into salts, the suffix “-monium” is added. So, a 16-Carbon attached to a Nitrogen with three methyl groups is Cetrimonium Chloride.

Polymers

A variety of conventions are used to name polymers. For Nitrogen containing polymers, the term “Polyquaternium” is used. There is also a number associated with the ingredient but it doesn’t refer to anything chemically. It just happens to be the order in which the material was registered.

Other polymers use common abbreviations. PEG is Polyethylene Glycol. PPG is Polypropylene Glycol, etc. Then a number is included to refer to the moles of ethoxylation in the polymer.

Silicones

For silicone containing materials, terms like Dimethicone, Cyclomethicone and amodimethicone are used. Whenever you see some form of these words in a chemical name, you know there is some silicone in it.

Colorants

Ten years ago, you used to see the abbreviation FD&C in front of many chemical colorants. Today, however, the INCI has adopted a simplified method for naming colors. They just list the color followed by a number (e.g. Yellow 5). This doesn’t tell you anything about the chemical composition but you can get the structure by looking it up in the INCI. An alternative naming system is the EU one in which each colorant is assigned a 5-digit chemical index (CI) number. Yellow 5 in the EU is called CI 19140.

Miscellaneous Rules

There are many other rules that you’ll have to learn over time. To give you a flavor here are a few more.

1. Water is just called Water. (Not deionized or purified or anything else. Just water)
2. Fragrance is called Fragrance no matter what compounds are used to make it. This is changing but for now, it’s correct.
3. Botanicals use the Latin name of the plant or part plus the term Extract. So, if you use an ingredient taken from the leaf of a lemon, the ingredient is called Citrus Medica Limonum (Lemon) Leaf Extract.

Conclusion

The naming of raw materials in cosmetics share some characteristics with the IUPAC system you learned in Organic Chemistry. However, there are many differences and for some things it is impossible to determine the chemical structure from just the name. For more information, your best bet is to go to your company’s library (or your city’s) and take a look at the latest version of the INCI.

Do you have any ingredient naming questions? Leave a comment below and let us know.