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Best alternatives to carbomer that are not petroleum-derived and form a thick gel?
- HEC seems pretty good to me, what is your experience?
What do you think of:
- Sclerotium gum?
- Aloe Vera powder?
- Dehydroxanthan? (normal xanthan gum is too snotty for me texture-wise)
Alginate smells a bit like seaweed so that’s quite a no for me.
Thank you! -
2 Replies
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Aloe vera, does that ever get thick before you go broke?Snotty? How so and why should the “improved” version be any better? Xanthan has strong synergies with locust bean gum and similar gums. Depending on the combination, you can tweak rheology to your likings.Alginate smells of seaweed? Not mine… it’s food grade and I didn’t notice any smell/taste at all.BTW HEC isn’t necessarily 0% petroleum. Depending on synthesis/manufacturer, the ethyl groups come from petroleum chemistry and not from bio-ethanol. -
@akuatajaThick is a very broad term and defining what you want to achieve might help you get some responses (Do you want to suspend something? is it just thickening? must it be a clear gel?)For a gel with only one thickener, I would go with the dehydroxanthan gum - It does however not gel enough to suspend particles and is more sensitive to electrolytes than regular xanthan gum, so beware of that.You might also want to try a multi-component gel (Binary often good enough great, meaning you use two gelling agents). As Pharma mentions Xanthan has synergies with Locust bean gum and “similar gums” - similar gums are galactomannans and guar, fenugreek and tara gum also fall in the same category.edit: formatting
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