Natural Shower Gel Formulation

Formulating

Natural Shower Gel Formulation

Posted by braveheart on December 27, 2014 at 12:07 pm

I am trying to make a natural shower gel and would appreciate any help I can get. I want it slightly
acidic.

I have lots of organic vegetable glycerine,
coco-betaine, magnesium chloride and carbomer 940. I have lavender, peppermint and ginger. I
also have tea tree oil and . I am thinking of getting some decyl glucoside, too. But would also like to use sea buckthorn oil.

Please help.

**Forgive me if I am posting in the wrong category - I am still new on the forum**

nasrins replied 9 years, 4 months ago 5 Members · 10 Replies
10 Replies

Chemist77

Member
December 27, 2014 at 12:17 pm

First of all salts and carbomers together are a big NO, now coming to the choice of surfactants and formula you can either adopt a sulfate based or sulfate free and still claim enriched with NATURAL OILS. Also thickening with HASE polymers and then expecting final pH as acidic wouldn’t be my choice. If at all you have to use then try Aqua SF1 but again you would have lots of persistent aeration with this polymer if you are not careful with your mixing. Not being sure about your final costing and target customers you can use Glutamate VLT (as @Belassi has suggested this in many earlier posts) if you go the sulfate free way otherwise if it’s a regular sulfate based formula then no issues at all.

Maybe for natural concept you try to find Ecocert products to choose the ingredients accordingly.
belassi

Member
December 27, 2014 at 3:00 pm

If you want to make a NATURAL shower gel, well, that would be natural soap I should think. Nothing ‘natural’ about Carbomer or coco-betaine. And why magnesium chloride?

First decide if you are going to go the natural soap route (which involves quite a lot of work and experience with saponification of different oils) and a pH of 10, or if you’re going to go synthetic, in which case then you have two possibilities - sulphate free or salt-thickened.

I do not recommend sulphate free for a body wash for one simple reason: it will be too expensive.

For a salt-thickening body wash, Plantaren APB or Texapon KD S03 are premixed blends that are both low-irritation and wonderfully foamy.
braveheart

Member
December 27, 2014 at 3:08 pm

Thanks for the responses…

@milliachemist … I just picked it up from one of the threads to avoid glycerine if I needed foaming.

Sorry, I don’t know what HASE polymers are and wonder if they are available in the UK.

@Belassi …Yes, I want to go sulphate-free.

And I am not sure if liquid castile will clog pores.

Liquid castile doesn’t foam well, this was why I turned to coco-betaine.

I was just reading your post on anti-acne body shampoo; to an extent that is what I am trying to do. But I was thinking of using a foaming surfactant with sea buckthorn oil.

I am wondering of Plantaren APB or Texapon KD S03 are available in the UK, too.
braveheart

Member
December 27, 2014 at 3:41 pm

what about the use of Ultratex for thickening/gelling purposes?
belassi

Member
December 27, 2014 at 4:42 pm

Liquid castile doesn’t foam well, this was why I turned to coco-betaine.

A glance at the oil properties at soapcalc.net would have told you that. To get real foam you need coconut and castor oils. Olive oil provides conditioning benefits.
OldPerry

Member
December 27, 2014 at 4:54 pm

I think the place to start is to list what you mean by “natural”. By many people’s definition of natural something that has Carbomer in it would not be considered natural.
belassi

Member
December 27, 2014 at 8:08 pm

Yes. That’s right. Are there any synthetic surfactants that are able to claim the name “natural”? Constantly we hear all sorts of nonsense, such as “it’s made from coconut so it must be natural”. I have the feeling that there are “natural synthetic” surfactants by some of the more interesting (and harder to source) companies. (Went into the lab to see if I could find some data. Nope.) However there are some interesting things out there, eg:

Description: Natural surfactant blend made of four different surfactants with different ionicity: Sodium cocoamphoacetate (amphoteric), lauryl glucoside (non-ionic), sodium cocoyl glutamate (anionic), and sodium lauryl glucose carboxylate (anionic). But how “natural” is that?
nasrins

Member
December 28, 2014 at 2:51 am

@milliachemist I still have problem why carbomer is incompatible with salts…
Chemist77

Member
December 28, 2014 at 3:17 am

@nasrins Carbomer which is a HASE polymer thickens by virtue of charge repulsion when the emulsion uncoils after alkaline hydrolysis, now add salt to this and you compromise the charge repulsion of the polymer molecules and once that is compromised the viscosity drops.

Hope that clears it for you and I hope someone can present it in a better way if I am still unclear.
nasrins

Member
December 28, 2014 at 6:30 am

HCl and NaOH acts like salts with carbomer? I mean carbomer is just stable in neutrolize media, very acidic or alkalin media damage carbomer structure?