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FIRST OIL CLEANSE
So I want to make a natural first cleansing oil that removes makeup well.
I don’t have any chemist background - I’m a facialist. I just want to make a product that will remove makeup well and doesn’t harm the environment.
I’ve looked at jojoba oil and safflower oil. From a chemist point of view - are oil cleansers good for removing makeup? I don’t want sulfates and would like to be natural ingredients and fragrance free.
Ideally the oil would turn into a cleansing milk to then be washed off. What would be the best emulsifier?
Thank you!
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33 Replies
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First of all, sulfates are not used for this purpose anyway (at least I have never seen such a product). Fragrance-free is a good idea as many people are sensitive to fragrances.
But what makes you think that “natural” is good? You need to do more research on the “natural” concept. And when I say research I don’t mean reading EWG, but at least type word “natural” in the search function of this forum and spend 1-2 hours reading what people with a tag “professional chemist” or “pharmacist” say about the concept of natural. Archive on this forum is a treasure and many don’t realise it. It’s free storage of knowledge and expertise.
Natural is not even a defined term. Even Ecocert certified ingredients are not natural. They don’t grow on trees. Synthetics are safer and perform better.
You don’t need to be a chemist to notice that oils do actually dissolve make-up better than surfactant based (read lathery and bubbly) cleansers. If you are interested in the reasons, when we say make-up we mostly mean foundation. I am generalising here but most foundations are made as w/o emulsions which are water-resistant. It’s much easier to break it with an oil cleanser. Like dissolves like. Similar is true about lipsticks that are mostly made of oils and waxes. It’s slightly more complex when it mascaras.
Anyway, the short answer to your question is Cithrol 10 GTIS by Croda which is sold here https://www.glamourcosmetics.it/gb/gc-glytris and they have international delivery.
There are other materials that would work (polysorbate 80 being one of them) but Cithrol 10 GTIS is the most bulletproof, others might perform better or worse depending on the type of oil.
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ngarayeva001 said:First of all, sulfates are not used for this purpose anyway (at least I have never seen such a product). Fragrance-free is a good idea as many people are sensitive to fragrances.
But what makes you think that “natural” is good? You need to do more research on the “natural” concept. And when I say research I don’t mean reading EWG, but at least type word “natural” in the search function of this forum and spend 1-2 hours reading what people with a tag “professional chemist” or “pharmacist” say about the concept of natural. Archive on this forum is a treasure and many don’t realise it. It’s free storage of knowledge and expertise.
Natural is not even a defined term. Even Ecocert certified ingredients are not natural. They don’t grow on trees. Synthetics are safer and perform better.
You don’t need to be a chemist to notice that oils do actually dissolve make-up better than surfactant based (read lathery and bubbly) cleansers. If you are interested in the reasons, when we say make-up we mostly mean foundation. I am generalising here but most foundations are made as w/o emulsions which are water-resistant. It’s much easier to break it with an oil cleanser. Like dissolves like. Similar is true about lipsticks that are mostly made of oils and waxes. It’s slightly more complex when it mascaras.
Anyway, the short answer to your question is Cithrol 10 GTIS by Croda which is sold here https://www.glamourcosmetics.it/gb/gc-glytris and they have international delivery.
There are other materials that would work (polysorbate 80 being one of them) but Cithrol 10 GTIS is the most bulletproof, others might perform better or worse depending on the type of oil.
Thank you for your comment.
When I mean natural for the oil I mean plant derived or from nuts.
I have read a few posts on here regarding natural products being irritable and synthetics are better etc. but I want products that won’t pollute water or have a bad affect on the environment.
Although synthetics perform better, can they have bad side effects in other aspects?
I will look at the ingredients recommended thank you
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DLR94 said:…but I want products that won’t pollute water or have a bad affect on the environment.Although synthetics perform better, can they have bad side effects in other aspects?
…I completely understand what you mean (me too, I try to use as natural ingredients as possible/feasible), so please forgive me for being sarcastic: if you care that much about nature, why do you use cosmetics & makeup in the first place? They ALL pollute nature, they are ALL non-ecological, and they ALL have a bad effect on the environment, no matter their origin or production process.Also, many ‘natural’ ingredients are as bad as petroleum based ones, think palm oil from monocultures (production from monoculture in general with special emphasis on canola/rapeseed but certain palm oil producers in particular). Cosmetics & makeup are luxury goods and more often than not don’t serve a purpose necessary for survival and they are all linked in some way or another to unnecessary pollution regardless of their carbon footprint.Furthermore, simply because they are ‘natural’ doesn’t make them easily biodegradable. ‘Normal’ oils (triglycerides and ester oils) are less biodegradable and pose a serious threat to soil life compared to certain ‘synthetic’ water soluble derivatives. Life and cosmetics aren’t that simple.‘Natural’ is often used to describe products which contain a certain amount of ‘non-petro’ compounds without necessarily mentioning how the final product has been obtained from raw materials. With ‘natural’ ingredients it’s often not known whether or not they are synthesised ‘biologically’ using microbes (often biotechnologically modified), ‘biologically’ using highly purified enzymes (often genetically modified), ‘biologically’ using heat and pressure (using electricity from a nuclear power plant), ‘synthetic’ using recyclable catalysts (these days, many are recycled or repurposed), or ‘synthetic’ using a blend of mostly ‘natural’ with ‘a bit petro and old-fashioned dirty chemistry’.It all boils down to your personal definition of good and evil and how well you sleep with the decisions you make and products you buy.Regarding your question: Yes, everything can have a bad side effect. Life is not possible without water and water is healthy and wonderful. But try telling that to a shipwrecked sailor 1000 miles away from the next shore *glugg-glugg-glugg*. And don’t forget, the deadliest poisons are natural (100 times stronger than VX)!Cosmetics ingredients much like food additives and many more things are required to be safe (until proven otherwise). Is there a higher chance for a ‘synthetic’ ingredient to show side effects than a natural one? No. It may however happen more often with ‘synthetics’ because they haven been newly developed whereas the ‘natural’ ones are in use for millennia. If you were to compare a newly discovered ‘natural’ ingredient with an ‘old’ synthetic one, things would look exactly the other way round. So yes, we messed up more than once with new and ‘safe’ synthetic compounds. Like our ancestors must have messed up things when trying to survive on all natural stuff: ‘Hmm.. I wonder if I can eat that huge worm-like animaaarrrrggghhhh…’. -
@Pharma ^ this is gold! ^
It is risible to want to start formulating on a small scale with the goal to save the environment, for one reason or the other. There is certain point of the philosophy “local, small scale, hand-made, green, whatever” blurb that just breaks and doesn’t hold together.
The practical problems are, in my opinion, the most important. The small-scale factor for example. It takes a lot more energy, per mass unit of finished product to heat, cool, or stir a smaller batch than a larger one, mainly because of energy dissipation, and the fact that large scale manufacturers have vessels that have been the product of over a century of technological improvement to guarantee the least possible loss of energy. The usual (of which I am one) kitchen chemist with a beaker and a double boiler and a stick blender is perhaps the least energy efficient (aside from an open pit coal fire). And there are many more. It is a lot greener to move 15 tonnes of anything in a truck from a port to a factory than shipping 15000 x 1 kg packages through the post service or a fast courier across the country. On top of that, let’s consider that 1 kg of that repackaged product is probably half-way through its shelf life already, and that you will use perhaps 30% of it before throwing it away. And if you managed to use it all, you probably had many failures, and your product will spoil faster, because it’s an old ingredient.
On the other hand, hand-made should be a synonym of absolute craftsmanship, unsurpassed quality, and uniqueness. Oftentimes it is a sub-par product, with mediocre or comparable quality to a mass-produced item. So something is missing there.
And what is missing there is the craftsmanship. You can’t compare yourself with a company with the best possible technological equipment, best and freshest ingredients, and hundreds of years of combined expertise (given by the formulator chemists employed, and the existing scientific literature).But I am ranting here. The morale is, if you think you are doing small-scale, hand-made, green, safe-for-the-environment cosmetic products, you are dead wrong. You’ll be greener if you had to drive 50 miles to buy a cleanser packaged in a non-recyclable container, wrapped in styrofoam, using a diesel car from the 1970.
On a side note, oils, for example, dramatically increase the oxygen demand of waste treatment. If that oxygen demand is not met, the septic flora dies off because of the anoxic conditions, and if that happens (and the septic treatment plant cannot cope with the “fat matter”) the efflux might end up in rivers, lakes, and seas, where it deprives flora and fauna living there of oxygen.
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@DLR94, that’s not a right conclusion. You just need to forget to about making a skincare brand that is more sustainable than what is currently on the market.
You still can create something good. Just don’t buy into toxic chemicals/nasty sulfates/suffocating silicones agenda. Also, it’s a fantastic hobby. Just imagine a feeling of being in Bloomingdales/Saks/John Lewis/Harrods/any other fancy shopping mall in the skincare department with all those outrageously overpriced jars and think “I can make it”. -
@DLR94 that is not the point of it.
If you convince yourself (and others) that it is a valid point, than it is a valid point. That is how marketing works, and why there will always be a certain ingrentient “hype”, or a new chemical will be demonized (think about sulfates, parabens). The trick part is trying to convince others.
However, thinking home-made, small-batch cosmetics as being green would be a lie.
What you need to ask yourself, and your brand is:
- what are my goals?
- what market am I targeting? And on which scale?
- what are the benefits of my product(s) in respect to the rest?
- what are the weaknesses in my product(s) and where should I invest to improve them?
- how novel is my product?
- does my product innovate the market? Is it new, uses new ingredients, makes new claims, new packaging, new technology, new marketing strategy etc…?
- how honest do I want to be with the customers?If you can answer all these in an articulated, fact-and-science backed way then there “might” be a point in making your product, if not, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board.
These answers will constitute the nucleus of your business plan. Again, that will be only for yourself. You still have to convince the public to buy your product, so you might have to redesign your plans again and again, until people buy in.
From there, you go technical and create a business plan, contact experts, do more product research and development, look for capital, investors and so on.
Remember, creating a product is not making a product that YOU want, but the product that YOUR CUSTOMERS ABSOLUTELY WANT.
i.e., if there is no demand for the formula you’ve developed, you will not sell it.On the other had, you can go around by creating a demand for a product through marketing, but you’ll never be able to compete with multinational companies (unless you have $Bn to spare for market research, advertisement, and lobbying).
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To add to the above, unfortunately, you can’t always be honest with consumers. They want a dream in a bottle not a list of functional ingredients. I don’t suggest making false claims. I have a friend to whom I said million times I don’t do “natural”, she told to another person that the hair oil I made for her is better than the ones on the market because it’s “homemade and natural”. I stepped in right away and clarified it wasn’t natural. The answer was “yeah but it’s homemade, so it’s better”. The “natural” homemade hair oil was made of dimethiconol dispersed in Cyclopentasiloxane with an artisanal pinch of phenyl trimethicone
Look what Lush do for example. They say “freshly made” and let people assume it’s natural. They use old fashioned formulation method as if they took them from Harry’s 8th edition issued in 2000. Not very natural, and they don’t say it. It’s “just freshly” made -
Thank you for the comments everyone. I will bin the natural and hopefully just make good products… :#
Where could a get a formulation from? I know which oils I would like but I want to make sure that everything is fine to mix etc. I don’t have knowledge of chemistry I just know which products I would like to include…
It would be a mix of safflower, jojoba and hemp? I only know from my industry that these are good oils but from a chemist background - are they going to do the job for removing makeup?
Thank you!
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It’ll depend on the composition of the makeup you are trying to remove. Surfactants are used to remove things because of their amphiphilic nature, oils can only help remove materials of similar polarity. You could add an emulsifier to take your formulation up a notch and make wash-off easier.
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@DLR94
Scrap all the fancy oils like jojoba and hemp. You want to make a cleanser / make up remover, so most of the things you put in the cleanser will get absorbed onto a cloth / cotton disc / or down the drain.
Even more, as you follow your first cleanse with an aqueous surfactant cleanser, it doesn’t make any sense to stuff your first cleanser with expensive or fancy oils.Now, if you want to add them to make your label fancy (as we were talking before) just add jojoba or other fancy oils below 0.5%. You will still put them on the ingredient list, and everyone will rejoice.
Steer clear from things like hemp seed oil, grapeseed oil, and similar, because they have an extremely short shelf life, even at very low percentages, they will make your product go rancid quite fast.
You also want a thin consistency, to help spreadability and absorbency onto cleaning pads or cloths. For this reason you may want to replace most of the oils with a light, low viscosity oil, for example fractionated coconut oil, or capric/caprylic triglycerides (aka MCT). For the rest, stick with cheap and fluid oils, for example sunflower, safflower, prunus oils like almond, apricot kernel etc,,, Keep olive oil for salads.
Many claim that castor oil is good in oil cleansers. I personally do not see any evidence and I did not find any study that confirms that. Plus it’s viscous as hell.The last improvement you could do is adding a low HLB emulsifier to your oils, anything in the range 3-8 will do. In most cases, you will get a clear solution of the emulsifier into your oil, but when you rinse out with water, you will emulsify them and you will get a better lift of product and make-up from the face upon rinsing.
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Perfect thank you so much. Can I just say that you are all so helpful and I really appreciate the advice.
I’m obviously not a chemist - so I have looked into the oils recommended and would this be an ok solution?
Safflower - 50%
Sunflower - 20%
Capric/Caprylic Triglycerides - 15%
Polyglyceryl-4 Oleate - 15%
The solution is to be pumped into hands and then directly onto face.I have had a lot of clients asking me to make them an oil based cleanser and I do have quite a big following that I can sell to. I know this will be a very basic formulation to you all but it is only for me to make for my current clientele.
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Hi @DLR94, 15% of glyceryl-4 oleate seems reasonable. As this will be the majority of your cost, you may eventually elect to reduce it.
Another emulsifier that will work (and is liquid, so it will dissolve well in your mixture) is sorbitan oleate (or laurate, or stearate, but those are solids).Safflower and sunflower oils are virtually almost identical. Unless you already use both you can only use one of them in your formula.
What you should try to do next is starting with your basic formula (in small amount, 100 g or even less!) and try it out. From there you can adjust the proportion of medium viscosity oils (sunflower, safflower), low viscosity (CCT), so that it gives the required solvency for greasy make-up and spreadability.
You don’t want something that drags, but something light and lubricious. If you want something more viscous, however, you can add castor oil.
The right viscosity will also play a big role since you want to pump these products, you don’t want high-velocity oils shooting out of the pump!Next phase, you can play with the emulsifier, by increasing or reducing the percentage until you achieve a good rinsing ability.
Additionally, you can move toward higher HLB values (you can do so by changing emulsifier, or by mixing a low HLB one with a medium-HLB one, like polysorbate-80 or -60). Those will definitely leave a more clean, less unctuous feeling after the first cleansing, but of course you will need more materials and test-runs.
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@Imosca
Thank you for your comment. I have been looking at my formulation based on other products that I have used and they have worked well.
A few of them have safflower & sunflower in their products. As I don’t have a science background, is there a way I can find out which ingredients are more or less identical? I want to make a product that works and not put anything in for the sake of it, which is what I assume would be if I put both the safflower & sunflower in?
Also as this is a first cleanse, I have a lot of male clients with dry skin and I know they don’t wear make-up, would this be a good cleansing solution for them if they didn’t use an aqueous surfactant cleanser afterwards?
Thank you for all the help. I will look into the polysorbate.
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@DLR94, for oils, it is quite simple. To see what oils you want to replace, just look up the “Fatty acid profile of XXX oil”. Most commercially important oils will have their average fatty acid profile listed somewhere.
You can then compare the relative percentages of fatty acids to decide what oil to replace and with with what. Do not pay too much attention to the fatty acids that come at % lower than 1%, you will not see any difference.
What you must be sure of is the “variety of oil”. While all oils have variations in composition depending on the cultivated varietal, climate where the source is grown, and even the harvesting season, those are usually small-ish variation.
However, some oils (sunflower, safflower, canola) have different breeds that are cultivated ultimately for oil production, for example, you can find high-, mid- and low-oleic versions of sunflower and safflower oils, and canola oil is a low erucic-acid version of colza or rapeseed oil. Always check what version you have before looking up the content. These varieties have been developed for increased shelf-life (high-oleic), and reduced toxicity to humans (low-erucic).For other ingredients, well, the matter seems more complicated, but it is not as much. Group your ingredients by function. You will have:
- Emollients (all oils, esters, “thin” waxes and butters, silicones, and many more)
- Occlusives (waxes, paraffins, silicones, some heavy oils and butters)
- Humectants (glycerin, glycols, sodium lactate, polyols, panthenol, NaPCA, etc…)
- Film formers (proteins, peptides, aloe, hyaluronic acid, polymers, most of these also work as humectants)
- Conditioners (those are a mixed category, you can have positively charged molecules, like CTAC, BTMS, polymers like amodimethicone, polyquats), but some non-charged ingredients are also conditioners, like those that form polymer films (silicones mainly).Of all these ingredients, the most basic formula will contain only one of those, for example, for function alone, it is pointless to have glycerin, propanediol, and sodium lactate or sodium PCA together, they all do the same stuff, keep water on the surface of the skin (humectant). You can replace, mix, and substitute them because you want to change how a formula performs, glycerine is sticky and draggy, so replacing it or subbing some of it with sodium lactate and propanediol will reduce the stickiness of the formula.
Waxes, paraffins and silicones can all behave as occlusives, but waxes are sticky and draggy, paraffins are greasy, and silicones are usually not. That’s why you have a lot to play with, depending on the formula you want to achieve. But roughly the same ultimate goal will be achieved by using either one of those alone!Now, some ingredients cannot be replaced by others, in some situations.
You will not use sodium lactate in place of glycerin in a formula that is sensitive to electrolytes, or you will not use waxes, butters and solids fats in something that needs to be thin and liquid.Or, you have the necessary ingredients:
- Emulsifiers and co-emulsifiers
- Surfactants
- Preservatives
- Water (for aqueous based, of course).Those are the ingredients that, when replaced with others in the same category, will give you a completely different final product, or require different formulation, or, in the worst case, make a catastrophic mess with your ingredients.
Then there are the “fancy ingredients”.
- Actives that work (some vitamins like retin-xx, ascorbic acid, niacinamide, sunscreens, chemical exfoliants like AHA, BHA, etc… really, there are not many that work)
- “Actives” that don’t work (the majority, including virtually most plant extracts, save a few) - those are claim ingredients, you add them at 0.01%, or replace them with anything and you will still get the same effect - nothing. But you can put them on the label and everybody is going to flock and say how that “Internecivus raptus extract” is miraculous.Of course, I am oversimplifying, but the kernel of the issue is there.
Keep your formulas simple, test them out, and refine them by:
1) replacing one ingredient at a time
2) adding one ingredient at a time. -
@imosca
This is really helpful. Thank you.
Hopefully it will be fun and not an expensive mess but we shall see…
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@lmosca Internecivus raptus extract is amazing, you’ll have to share your supplier 😆
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@EVchem, I am big Alien dork, and I try to slip that in from time to time.
Aside from that, if properly diluted, the extract can be used as a chemical exfoliant! 😉 -
You might have two problems with polyglyceryl 4 oleate: it might form water resistant w/o, it might sit on the bottom of the bottle and would need shaking. Creating oil cleanser isn’t as easy as it sounds. Cithrol 10 GTIS is a bullet proof solution. It will dissolve in most types of oils no matter the polarity. I am not saying you cannot make other emulsifiers work but you will waste liters of materials until you establish % at which that emulsifier solubilises completely. It might be a razor thin balance. Saying it from the experience.
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ngarayeva001 said:…I am not saying you cannot make other emulsifiers work but you will waste liters of materials until you establish % at which that emulsifier solubilises completely…Not to mention the time you might waste because some emulsifiers sediment/separate after weeks of storage and seemingly good stability…I was really happy and astonished how well my first oil cleanser turned out until a few weeks have passed and one of the emulsifiers started to ‘fall out’. It’s still working but looks like it has mould on the bottom.
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further to @ngarayeva001 the reason Cithrol 10GTIS works so well is that it’s self-dispersing (it has several bulky isostearate groups attached to the hydrophobic part) and also has a long hydrophilic section (PEG-20)a similar effect can be achieved without PEGs by combining, e.g. polyglyceryl-3 polyricinolate as a dispersing agent with a hydrophilic emulsifier -
@Pharma, It took me months, but I am happy to share my finding, Alkyl Benzoate is compatible with polysorbate 80. Made it in December, no signs of instability so far. I don’t even remember how many combinations I tried. When you work with polysorbates, all comes to polarity. No veg oil is polar enough. Although I had some success with sunflower seed oil it’s too early to make any statements.
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@Bill_Toge, thank you very much for this information. I came across a material (Sebumol S 1000) made of Polygylceryl-3 Polyricinoleate, Polyglyceryl-3 Diisostearate and Polyglyceryl-3 Caprate. It’s specifically designed for making bath oil. I was hesitant but will try it now.
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@ngarayeva001 I bought polysorbate 80 and Polyglyceryl-4-Oleate. Was that pointless?
Would I only need Cithrol in the cleanser?
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I also notice that tocopherol is in a lot of the ingredients for the different cleansing oils on the market I am currently looking at.
Why would this ingredient be added?
I made a 20ml formular.
Safflower - 60%
Capric/Caprylic Triglycerides - 35%
Polysorbate 80- 5%I used it to try and remove waterproof mascara, foundation, lipstick and SPF and it removed it ok. I’m going to gradually increase the polysorbate.
Even if it is effective at removing makeup and cleansing the skin, can I really sell a product with 3 ingredients in? I feel like I am ripping people off…
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