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Color in lotion and Shampoo
What percentage of color is used in Shampoo and lotion to give it a good look?
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8 Replies
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You have to provide more information and ultimately experiment to answer that. Is your color a pigment or a dye? what other ingredients are in your product?
For shampoo you probably want a dye. usually people will make a stock solution of a certain amount (say 1%) and then use that in their final formula, so the final concentration of dye ends up being very small.
You have to consider the light and chemical stability of the color as well. It might look good but fade rapidly, or interact with other ingredients.
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Yes, I think in a shampoo the powdered dye level is on the order of 0.001% but it is heavily dependent on what dyes you’re using.
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It is powder and sold locally with SLES. I don’t know if it is dye or pigment.
What is the difference?It is yellow color. I want Shampoo to have orange color
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In terms of cosmetics you can think of it like this.
Dyes = primarily used to color the formula
Pigments = primarily used to color the surface to which they are applied -
@Perry thanks a lot. It is dye then.
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1. go to your best factor (supplier) of dyes. Ask for a sample of the main colours. Here for instance, I was given red, pink, dark blue, sky blue, green, yellow, and orange.
2. make sure you have an accurate jeweller’s scale. The masses required are very tiny. Now you will test the dyes:
3. Accurately weigh out, 20mL (say) of pure water. Add a small amount of the dye to a folded piece of stiff paper. Use this to slowly add a small amount of dye to the 20mL of water. Depending on the dye, this might be (say) 20mg to give a 0.1% solution. Do not weigh the dye separately, the measurement errors are significant.
4. Mix well with a glass rod. Take a shampoo bottle and nearly fill it with pure water. Weigh it.
5. Add enough of the premixed concentrated dye solution to get the colour that you’re looking for. Weigh again. Do the math to calculate the % of dye solution required.
6. Leave the bottle in direct sunshine for a couple of hours and see if anything happens.
The above is a pretty basic test procedure. It’s likely that you will end up combining dyes to get particular colours. This may or may not work! I wanted a violet shampoo of a particular shade so I combined pink and blue. It worked super well so I made a whole batch of shampoo.
I took this along to a market and tried it out as a product. After five minutes in direct sun it changed to a turquoise colour. It was still quite attractive but I rather doubt there is a market for colour-changing shampoos. -
Those are good suggestions Belassi. I did something similar to test around 15 different colors but for solid products, so I used a small amount of water and Baking Soda. I was able to get multiple shades by simply adding virgin baking soda to my stock solution.
Some colors are distinctly different with solid products vs liquid.
To the OP, if you are looking for a nice orange color try D&C Orange 4.
At 0.1% , I managed to color some Syndet Bars (unpressed yet!) as you see in the picture. In a liquid product, I think 0.05% would be a good starting point.
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