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Adjusting cream shampoo
Recently developed a cream shampoo and performed decently in Lab stability. When manufacturing produced it, the product came out to thick. Is there a general ingredient that could be used to lower viscosity besides adding back water?
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10 Replies
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Hi Gooch. Can you indicate the ingredient list here?
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This is an extremely common problem - the differences produced by scale-up from lab to manufacturing scale.
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Unless you’ve got the entire batch in a tank or in storage waiting to be adjusted, rather than add water, which will lower the % of all the other ingredients, I’d cut back on just the ingredients that are thickening your batch.
If it’s a standard salt-thickening formula and there’s no other thickener, just use less salt next time.
If you are trying to adjust the first batch that’s too thick, you might want to try adding more of your primary surfactant and water, rather than just water. Of course, test this on a lab scale first.
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Coca. Betaine, and Coca. Hydroxysultaine are the main surfactants.
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Experiment by adding some polysorbate 20 or some propylene glycol. IF you go with propylene glycol and add too much you want to check foaming of product
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If the blend is salt-thickening, I would have thought the obvious thing would be to carefully increase the salt level so as to take it past the peak of the curve and into less viscosity. Or alternatively add / increase CDEA content.
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Of course it’s obvious after you tell us about it, @Belassi, but I didn’t think of it - I’m always focused on staying below the peak of the curve. Great idea!
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Going past the peak of the salt curve then increases to potential for physical instability and separation.
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Another option might be to make a small batch with no thickener and use this to adjust the high viscosity batch.
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Sounds like a great situation in which you should do a knockout experiment.
https://chemistscorner.com/do-you-know-the-fastest-way-to-become-an-expert-cosmetic-formulator/Knockout Experiments for Cosmetics - The Fastest Way to Become an Expert Formulator
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