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Mixing cetyl alcohol and stearyl alcohol to get good Cetearyl Alcohol ?
I know that I can buy Cetearyl Alcohol, but I have a ton of cetyl acohol and I can buy some stearyl alcohol.
If I melt and mix the cetyl and stearyl together in the 30/70 ratio, will the resulting product be essentially Cetearyl Alcohol?
Or is there a special process which makes it Cetearyl Alcohol? -
5 Replies
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There are different ratios of C16:C18 for these. The 30:70 is more generally used but I’ve always preferred the 50:50 material finding the extra cetyl provides easier lamellar liquid crystal formation. Proctor & Gamble figured all this out many years ago when they had the fatty alcohol market homogenized, and P&G still makes and uses a boatload of material every day.
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@chemicalmatt which one provides easier lamellar liquid crystal formation?
50:50 or cetyl alcohol alone? -
My choice would be cetyl alcohol alone in most formulations. Where you have GMS, stearic acid, sucrose stearate, etc. etc. mainly C18 moities, the cetearyl would behave better.
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I’m completely with @chemicalmatt here.However, some scientific publications (not by P&G :smiley: ) indicate the same increase in stability. The issue is that the ones I’ve read didn’t use C18 stuff or in a way where it can’t be used… Anyway, it seems as if, at least in some formulations, fatty alcohols wouldn’t align with emulsifiers in a way which is usually depicted. They seem to be slightly offset towards the oil phase and hence, it might well be that the C16:C18 blend performs better even if in a C18 dominated formulation (which remains to be demonstrated). Could it be calculated or predicted? Not that I know of. Maybe in very simple mixtures using COSMO-RS? -
in my experience, I’ve found that all three can be used interchangeably, but cetearyl alcohol is the cheapest
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