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How to mix water soluble extracts with Ethyl Acetate?
Hello all,
This forum helps me grow tremendously with all your help and comments. I want to thank everyone here. I don’t have much experience in the field to give back the knowledge I have and share my insights right now. But hopefully I will in the near future.There is another obstacle that I have encountered as I was formulating a type of nail strengthener which is solvent based, ethyl Acetate and butyl Acetate being the first two ingredients in IL.Marketing team wants to put as many natural extracts, mostly water soluble, as possible so that their marketing claims would be more effective and attractive. Unfortunately, EA does not mix with water .So I tried first mixing some water soluble extracts in water. and then pipette little bit into acetone. and then pipette little out of this mixture into EA. If I do not keep the amount low, when I am adding mixture in Acetone, it gets cloudy and separates within minutes.So pretty much, the actual amount of the extracts this nail strengthener contains would be like in parts per million. If you analyze the product, it will certainly say that the product contains the extract, but I wonder if there is better way of mxing them.Again, thank you everybody.Best,Mark -
3 Replies
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Mark, I have plenty of experience with those solvents but as a painter, using them to paint cars with Metalflake(tm). Nail lacquer is basically the same but in tiny amounts.
I’ll say this: water - to the point even of air humidity - is the enemy of these laquers such as ethyl acetate. For instance when spraying suspended flakes in ethyl acetate, if you do it on a humid day you’ll very likely get a ruined paint finish because it will cloud. This is what you saw yourself.Frankly there is NO way to get any polar item into the laquer. You can only use nonpolar or dry ingredients. I doubt very much whether any additive would actually “benefit” the nail, which is only hard keratin after all.Oh, one more thing - be careful of personal exposure! Please! I have high sensitivity to such solvents because I failed to take adequate precautions when custom cars were my hobby. -
Thank you @Belassi for your words and advice.
When you say there is “NO way to get any polar item into the laquer,” it is kinda frustrating. Now what should I do lol. I wonder how other companies like Essie and OPI do it to make their nail strengthener then. Their LOI contains such water soluble ingredients. I assume they do use very veyr tiny amount?Anyways, thank you Belassi!Best, -
The ones you mentioned may not even be using an acrylic base. There are other bases available. For instance (this would not be used in a nail product) one type of paint uses a two-pack formulation that actually relies on humidity in the air as a catalyst to make the paint chemically harden.
Now how would you make a nail “strengthener”? Hard to imagine.
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