If you ever wanted to create a Valentine’s Day themed cosmetic product, here is an ingredient you might consider adding.  Synthetic pheromones.

In a study from San Francisco State University researchers  men were found to be more attracted to women wearing pheromones in their perfume which resulted in more dates, kisses, cuddles and even sex.

Pheromones

Pheromones are a type of compound that allows animals to chemically communicate with each other. They are versatile chemicals that help ants figure out how to get home, that let dogs mark their territory and that let mammals know when to mate. The word pheromone comes from the Greek words pherin, to transfer, and hormone, to excite.  Pheromones are similar to hormones but instead of working within the body, they work between bodies.

How do they work?

The chemical communication of pheromones is simple. One animal (or human) releases the pheromone and another senses it. In essence, the behavior of the sensing animal is controlled by the pheromone releaser. In mammals, pheromones are detected by an organ called vomeronasal organ (VMO) which is located somewhere in the head between the nose and mouth. Pheromones are a bit like odor molecules but they have a much different effect.

So do pheromones really work?

Well, if pheromones really worked it would mean that controlling the behavior of people would be simple. If you wanted someone to fall in love with you, you could simply spray some pheromones whenever they’re around. Fortunately, human behavior is a bit more complicated than that.

It is still debated among scientists whether pheromones have an effect or not. These researchers demonstrated that women actually saw an increase in sociosexual activity when wearing perfume that contained pheromones. The impressive part of this research was that it was compared to a placebo control. But one study (of 36 women) isn’t enough to substantiate these incredible claims.

Other researchers have looked at all the human pheromone data and the results are inconclusive. Yes, pheromones are real. Yes, they may have some physiological effect. But how much pheromones change behavior is still unclear.

On a different day I’d be more skeptical on this one, but what the hell, Happy Valentines Day!

We received this question here at Chemists Corner central and thought it would be a good one to write an article about.

“Why do the raw material suppliers recommend the combination of presevatives versus using them alone…..for ex: why do the manufacturers recommend a combination of sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate rather than using them individually….

Why you put preservatives in cosmetics

With all the bad press about chemicals used to preserve cosmetics you might wonder why companies don’t just stop using preservatives.  Well, the reason is that cosmetics that contain preservatives are safer than ones that don’t contain preservatives.  This is because disease-causing microorganisms can multiply at exponential rates in cosmetics if there are no chemicals in there to stop them.

And if the consumer is putting a dollop of microbe laden skin lotion on their body, they are bound to contract a disease.  It is just not smart to use unpreserved cosmetics.

The other reason to include preservatives is that when microbes grow in your cosmetic product they can produce foul smelling odors and strange colors.  Consumers just aesthetically do not want to use bacterial contaminated products.  It’s a bit like the same reason people don’t want to eat moldy bread.

What do preservatives do

Cosmetic formulas have all the key factors needed for microbial growth including water, nutrients, and energy.  At a suitable pH and temperature, it will be like a microbial cocktail party.  Preservatives stop growth by killing cells and spores (usually by disrupting cell membranes) or by making the system hostile to growth.  See this article for more about cosmetic preservatives.

Why you need multiple preservatives

So that brings us to the question that started it all, why use multiple cosmetic preservatives?  Basically it’s because some single preservatives do not kill a big enough range of microorganisms.  As a cosmetic formulator you need to ensure that your preservative system will kill any bacterial, mold, or fungi that the formula might encounter.  Since you don’t know what will be encountered you have to plan for every possibility (or at least as many as you can).

There are some preservatives that are able to kill a wide range of microbes (e.g. Alcohol, Parabens, Formaldehyde donors).  That is why these ingredients are so popular with formulators.  Other ingredients like Sodium Benzoate or Potassium Sorbate are only effective against certain types of microbes.  They are more active against yeasts and molds but have a lower activity against bacteria.    One way to compensate for the ineffectiveness of one compound is to include another compound that has the ability to kill other organisms.  By combining preservatives, you increase the spectrum of microbes that your formula can withstand.

Of course, if you used parabens and formaldehyde donors you could be more confident in the effectiveness of your preservative system.  However, for marketing reasons these compounds must be avoided.  It makes your job as a cosmetic formulator a bit harder.

There are a variety of cosmetic emollients that cosmetic chemists will use to formulate skin and hair care products. The type you use will depend on your specific formula and the characteristics you are trying to achieve.

Emollients

Traditionally, emollients are considered ingredients which have smoothing or softening properties. They are put into formulas to provide moisturizing benefits and support a variety of conditioning claims. There are a number of types which we’ll list below.

Hydrophilic emollients

The term emollient is rather broad so things that are humectants can also be considered emollients. Water soluble ingredients like glycerin, sorbitol, and propylene glycol are all technically emollients. When you need conditioning, this are good ones for your water phase.

Lipophilic emollients

These are ingredients that are not soluble in water and make up the bulk of the available varieties of emollients. The one that you use depends on properties such as polarity, emolliency scores, spreading behavior, compatability with other ingredients, rheological behavior, and hydrolytic stability. This group can further be broken down by grouping them by their polairity.

Non-polar: These are mostly derived from petroleum and include ingredients like mineral oil, Isoparaffin, and Isohexadecane.

Polar: This includes a range of ingredients including materials such as natural oils (Jojoba oil, Olive oil, coconut oil), esters (Octyl Palmitate, Isopropyl stearate, Isopropyl palmitate) and alcohols (Octyl dodecanol).

Silicone fluid emollients

The final group is silicone fluids. They provide incredible levels of slickness and also feel light compared to lipophilic emollients. The most common ones used include Cyclomethicone and dimethicone. There are a number of varieties to choose from and each have different characteristics when it comes to viscosity, volatility, and ease of formulation.

As a cosmetic chemist, you will be often visited by chemical sales people and presented “new” raw materials to put in your formulas. Or you may be asked by your marketing people about ingredients and which cosmetic ingredients are better than others. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy question to answer. Read on to see why.

What are better cosmetic ingredients?

Although this might sound like a simple question, it really isn’t. That’s because the answer is highly dependent on what you mean by the phrase “better than.” And this is true of ANY raw material or beauty product for which you might have this question.

What makes one cosmetic ingredient better than another?

It all depends on which of the following factors are most important to you.

Ingredient Performance

This is related to how well a product does what it says it will do and how it compares to what you are already using. If a new emulsifier makes makes the product more stable then from a performance standpoint, it is better. If a surfactant improves your foam, or a moisturizing agent improves moisture scores, then these ingredients are better. The nice thing about a performance standard is that you can run a test, make a measurement and determine which is better.

Unfortunately, there are other less obvious factors to consider when figuring out which is the “better” cosmetic ingredient.

Price

Another important characteristic in determining whether something is better is price. The assumption is that if one product performs the same as another product but is less expensive, then it is better.

Of course, this is simplistic and the list price of a raw material doesn’t take into consideration other factors that can affect the cost impact to your company. For example, your purchasing department might have a contract with a supplier where you get price breaks based on volumes. If you change to a cheaper ingredient, this could raise the price of other ingredients.

But sometimes the performance doesn’t have to match exactly either. If you can get away with using a less expensive ingredient and still have most of the performance, sometimes it’s worth it.

Production Desires

While there are some ingredients that are easy enough to work with in the lab, they can often be nearly impossible to work with in production. I’m thinking of things like powders and highly viscous ingredients. When formulating and thinking about what is the “best” cosmetic raw material, consider also what your production people will think is the best. Generally, if it’s easier to work with in production, it’s a better ingredient.

Personal preference

I have to admit that there were ingredients that I liked working with. Often this was because I had success with the ingredient in the past. Or maybe I just liked to have a “signature” ingredient in all my formulas. Some cosmetic chemists just prefer to avoid using single sourced ingredients or animal derived products or other arbitrary choices. If you as the formulator think one ingredient is better than another, often that means the ingredient is better. Of course, your boss might make you have a different opinion.

Marketing concerns

Sometimes your marketing department will have an opinion about what is a better ingredient. If your group is hung up on the green movement, they’ll think that vegetable derived is better than petroleum products. They’ll think natural preservatives are better than parabens. They’ll also push for free-trade ingredients, biodegradable, low carbon footprint, etc. If you’re looking for a better ingredient, think about what your marketing group would say.

Better cosmetic ingredients

So how do you figure out which cosmetic ingredients are the best to use? The following checklist can help you figure it out.
1. First, have a standard test to compare performance
2. Consider the overall cost impact of the ingredient
3. Consider the impact on production
4. Figure out what your marketing people would say
5. Decide what you like

Cosmetic formulating is a creative endeavor. Remember, you are the artist and should always have the final say on what you think is the “better” technology.

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.