What Makes one Cosmetic Ingredient Better than another?
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…
Category: Formulating
The 10 Different Types of Cosmetic Formulas You Must Know
While there are literally thousands of different types of cosmetic products, there are actually only 10 different types of cosmetic formulas. Here is a brief…
HLB - The Easiest Way to Create An Emulsion
As a cosmetic chemist you will undoubtedly be asked to make products that require you to combine materials that aren’t easily compatible. Fortunately, there…
How to make a cosmetic formula
I’m experimenting with a whole new type of video recording. What do you think? If you’re interested in the program that was discussed in the…
Knockout Experiments for Cosmetics - The Fastest Way to Become an Expert Formulator
There are many different routes you can take to learn to become an expert formulation chemist but few are more powerful than conducting your own…
Why Cosmetic Chemists Should Always Try Their Products
The number of people I’ve known who work on products that they’ve never even tried has always amazed me . They miss so much when…
Lab Notebooks and the Cosmetic Chemist
When I was in college I dreaded writing lab reports. They seemed so structured and uncreative that doing them was a chore. Then you had…
Most common cosmetic preservatives
We frequently see brands that claim to be “paraben free” and “formaldehyde free.” With so many new brands making this claim it might surprise you…
Demonstrating a cosmetic benefit
I was reading my twitter feed and noticed someone reporting from the annual PCPC conference (#pcpc2014 in case you are searching Twitter). The following quote…
A further look at the Whole Foods Ingredient list
In our continuing series examining the Whole Foods banned ingredient list, this article is going to focus on the dreaded “sulfates” category (and I’ll include…
Do consumers think about parabens in cosmetics?
If you spend a lot of time on the Internet surfing RSS feeds and social media, you could develop the notion that parabens are dangerous…
Old time cosmetic formulations
I just opened up a box I had in storage and rediscovered a formulation series of books called Benett’s The Chemical Formulary. I actually have…
No more formaldehyde - How to modify a cosmetic
J&J seems pleased with themselves for capitulating to fear mongering groups and reformulating their iconic J&J Baby Shampoo. We previously wrote about why caving to…
How long should your cosmetic formulas last?
I have personal care products that I haven’t opened for a few years. These are mostly hair styling products that I got for free and…
Cosmetic Prototype Batch Size
As a cosmetic formulator one of the most common decisions you’ll have to make is to decide how large a batch you need to make.…
A Formulating Strategy That Makes Sense
There is a discussion in the cosmetic science forum asking about the stabilization of Vitamin C in a formulation. It is an interesting enough conversation and…
Whole Foods Ingredient List Clarification
The following was submitted in response to the articles we published on the Whole Foods Banned ingredient list. I am writing in response to the…
The Whole Foods Unacceptable Ingredient List is Wholly Unacceptable
This post will explore acids that are found on Whole Foods’ premium body standards list. For those that didn’t catch last week’s post, the idea…
The Whole Foods Banned Ingredient List is Wholly Flawed
I intend these posts to be a multi-part series focusing on different parts of the nebulous Whole Foods banned ingredient list. The list I’ll be…
The Beat Goes on to Hyaluronic Acid Mini
Hyaluronic Acid, the ever acclaimed naturally occurring Biopolymer, with 50% of its bodily existence in the skin is sounding good…REAL good. We have experienced the…