Home Cosmetic Science Talk Formulating Advanced Questions Retinol complex ingredients not listed

  • Retinol complex ingredients not listed

    Posted by Yulin on October 2, 2021 at 3:42 pm

    Hello everyone,

    We have a competitor selling a retinol product that we are sure is not listing some of the “bad” ingredients in the retinol complex they are using.  We want to HPLC test their product to find what ingredients they aren’t missing but we first want to know what are the most common secondary ingredients in a retinol complex?  We know polysorbate 20 and 80 are very common but we are told it is very difficult to accurately HPLC test those.  Anyone have any other suggestions on what might be in the retinol complex?  Their LOI just lists water, thickener, retinol, preservative so it is not showing any of the typical retinol stabilizing ingredients.  

    Thanks!

    Costalia replied 2 years, 7 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • ariepfadli

    Member
    October 5, 2021 at 2:00 pm

    Thickener based cylclodextrin its possible

  • Microformulation

    Member
    October 5, 2021 at 2:03 pm
    Retinol with BHT/Polysorbate 20 OR Retinol with Tocopherol/Polysorbate 20 would be a strong possibility as well.
  • Costalia

    Member
    October 5, 2021 at 5:05 pm

    I wandered into this post for the exact same reason, so I’d love to get an update if possible.

    One supplier of encapsulated retinol is claiming to be BHA/BHT free, but I am suspicious that is total bunk because their patents say they source retinol 50C from BASF, which contains BHA/BHT.

    Does anyone know of a way to assay for BHA/BHT?

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