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Designing a cold process pearlizer
Hello everyone,
This is more a concept experiment at this point before I put too much time into this to see if my rationale is correct/wrong. Basically, supplied cold process pearlizers are simple to use and produce immediate drastic effects. They also are comprised of relatively simple ingredients (glycol stearates/sles/water). When not using a cold process pearlizer during production the stearates have to be heated and cooled properly, taking a lot longer to produce the pearl effect and it is never quite the same brilliance.
This has me wondering if it would be possible to recreate this effect so it can be cold processed and have immediate results. The theory would be to heat and melt the stearate/sles in water then slowly cool. As it passed the melting temperature there should be a time zone before reaching the crystallization temperature in which the batch could be “seeded” with an amount of commercial mix. This seeding would hopefully provide the crystalline framework for nucleation of the remaining of the batch. Future batches could then be seeded from this previous stock as required. Hopefully the end result would be a visually identical pearlizer to the commercial blend.
Is there any fundamental flaw in this reasoning?
Thanks,
RDchemist15 -
7 Replies
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RDchemist15 said:…
Is there any fundamental flaw in this reasoning?
…Yes, there is: In order for a seed crystal to work, you’d have to have a continuous phase to allow for a chain reaction. What you have, if I’m not mistaken, is an emulsion/micellar solution of isolated oil ‘particles’ surrounded by water. That’s like trying to spread corona when everyone does social distancing and stays well away from each other.It’s not exactly a crystallisation temperature in the simple sense but a certain crystal modification which causes the effect. That one forms at/below a certain temperature, that’s correct, but it may take its time to do so. It’s like making chocolate where you can use seed crystals to ‘jump’ to the desired modification (if you manage to melt it fully) but this doesn’t mean you can speedrun the game. It simply tells the non-desired modification to turn into the right one which it can only do with the right cool-down gradient and the right mixing speed because size matters (crystal size). This said, even with seed crystals it’ll take time, patience, and skills (mind, not just the chocolate making). -
@Pharma
Thanks, makes sense. Seeding idea is out. -
I began going that route but since pearliser is not exactly expensive, and gives excellent, very reproducible results, and is only used at say 3%, I decided to buy the commercial product.
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@Belassi
Maybe I need to start looking into new pearlizers then. We use the BASF line and it is ~10x more expensive then making ourselves. It’s not uncommon for commercial pearlizer to be >40 of the final formula. -
It’s not uncommon for commercial pearlizer to be >40 of the final formula.
— 40% of the formula? Really? -
Belassi said:It’s not uncommon for commercial pearlizer to be >40 of the final formula.
— 40% of the formula? Really?Sorry, “40% of the cost” not “40% of the weight”. For the cheaper body washes/foam baths/(SLES/CAPB), ya a lot of the cost is pearlizer when used at 3%.
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Wow I am surprised. I am going to have a look at my costs database. Hang on… OK. According to info, our last purchase came in around US$3 per kilo, which seems cheap enough.
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