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Glycol stearate as opacifier in body wash - slight problems
Hello,
So i have made a body wash that is great, it is thick, stable and performs wonderfully. Only thing is it’s clear, and i would like to opacify it and then add a little mica in for effect. Since I don’t want to use any PEG’s my choices for opacifying agents are very limited (correct me if i’m wrong here maybe there’s something i haven’t found?). It seems one of my only choices is glycol stearate.
The glycol stearate is great at first, i have been making test batches and 2% seems to work good. However once I throw it in the incubator over time it kind of seems like it wants to separate. It hasn’t yet but it’s showing that ever so slight beginning stage separation look, and even if it just stays like this forever i wouldn’t feel comfortable with that. The average person would never notice what i am seeing but I want it to be perfect. I want it to be completely stable and uniform.so my question is, is there anything else I could add to it to increase the cohesion? Something to just kind of tie everything together and make it hold? It seems like it’s 99% there but i am not sure what is needed. I saw that this dove body wash i have has stearic acid in it - could that be the missing piece of the puzzle?
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5 Replies
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@GeorgeBenson If the sign of separation is something going to the bottom (sedimentation), then you need to add a suspending agent, which is usual when you work with stearate opacifiers/pearlizers. If the type of separation is different, then there’s some other issue with your formula.
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@ketchito is spot on here: you’ll need a rheology stabilizer anyway since you plan to add mica to this. That being true, why not just add one of the mica-based opacifier-pearlizers (Timica perhaps?) after adding yield value with a rheology agent such as Synthalen W600?
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thanks for the input guys, so lack of a stabilizer seems to be my issue then, and even if it doesn’t fix the stearate issue (which i can live without) it should suspend the mica.
Do you know if Synthalen W600 is available for small retail buyers like myself? I noticed the inci for this, acrylates copolymer, is the same as carbapol aqua sf-1, are they the same? Unfortunately I have not found anything with this INCI being sold by any of the usual websites i buy from.
I currently have sepimax zen and Acrylates C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer on hand, could either of these work for stabilizing a body wash formula?I am currently using Glucose-Sorb from making cosmetics as my thickener, fwiw.
Thanks! -
Also, I was previously using xanthan gum as my thickener which seemed to also have the added benefit of suspending mica. I replaced it with the Glucose Sorb because I much prefer it’s overall effect on the product vs xanthan which makes it snot-like. But perhaps I could re-incorporate just a little bit of xanthan, enough to suspend the mica without giving off too much of its snotty consistency to the end product?
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@GeorgeBenson Unfortunately, Xanthan gum doesn’t give much yield value to suspend particles such as mica. Try with Acrylates C10-30 alkyl acrylate crosspolymer or as @chemicalmatt mentioned, try to get a sample of Synthalen W600 (for small batches, I think Lotioncrafter or Makingcosmetics might have something similar).
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