Home Cosmetic Science Talk Formulating Not brown night cream?

  • Not brown night cream?

    Posted by KimberlyLars on February 11, 2021 at 12:29 pm

    My customer is requesting a night cream with quite a lot of dark active ingredients. The lotion is pretty simple using montanovs. Issue is, they dont want it “this brown” but still want all thr avtives. I need to lighten it or change the color on some way, however everything I’ve tried so far leaves a white residue. Any suggestions? 

    pharma replied 3 years, 1 month ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • suswang8

    Member
    February 13, 2021 at 6:04 pm

    I asked a similar question a while ago, and it seems like one doesn’t have many options — assuming you cannot change the actives?  

    The consensus on this forum was that most manufacturers are using only very small quantities of certain pigmented ingredients listed on their packaging, hence they don’t have the issue you are describing with a final product that is “this brown.”

    What about using golden/yellow toned ingredients (e.g., calendula oil etc.) to assist?  

  • pharma

    Member
    February 14, 2021 at 3:12 pm
    What kind of dark active ingredients do you have? Basically, are they water or oil soluble?
    Montanovs might not be the best choice because they are lamellar network forming emulsifiers. Try one which results in very small uniform droplets (of the coloured phase within an uncoloured continuous outer phase). These emulsions tend to be whiter. As an example, should you have a coloured water phase, switching to a w/o emulsion.
    Play with pigments (ZnO, TiO2, boron nitride, aluminium oxide aka synthetic sapphire etc.) which are dispersed in the outer phase (might require surface modified ones) and/or try nano powders or the like to reduce whitening after application.
    Adsorb the actives onto a powder (this might even help to get a water soluble one into the oil phase and vice versa, just make sure it goes into the inner phase and also make sure that you have an inner phase).
    Pearlisers might help as well (IIRC especially together with pigments).
    Bleach/refine/charcoal-strip the extracts of switch to purified constituents.

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