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Separation in our cationic guar shampoos
Hello everyone!Merry Christmas! I hope you guys had a good one.
i just needed some advice here. So I formulated and manufactured cationic guar gum. The cationic guar we manufactured when used in shampoo causes separation such that white pasty liquid floats up while transparent phase settles at the bottom. I am attaching picture for reference. Can you guys help me what could be the reason? While i am not a professional or remotely experienced in cosmetics industry i believe it could be due to salt content. The cationic etherifying agent we use needs to be activated and upon activation it produces salt (1:1 salt:cationic agent). Though we filter out salt there is a good amount of salt that can be dissolved in the water phase. The industries we provided our samples to who tested it against Ashland’s and Jaguar’s cationic guar gum used our cationic guar gum instead of Ashland’s and Jaguar cationic guar gum in the same formulation. Though the company wouldn’t disclose it’s formulation for obvious reasons.
looking forward towards your kind comments
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5 Replies
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Salt level can certainly cause that. But what are the ingredients in the shampoo?
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Perry said:Salt level can certainly cause that. But what are the ingredients in the shampoo?
Unfortunately the company who tested our cationic guar wouldn’t disclose their formulation
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@minhasshah Perhaps I’m missing something, but regular cationic guar gums don’t require activation; rather, the addition of an acididic compound (like citric acid or EDTA) helps dissolve its coating to speed up the process, letting the polymer expand and hydrate. As @Perry confirmed, salt can be the reason for the separation (that seems to be the lamellar gel on the top), but it depends on your formula. Systems containing SLES, CAPB, quaternary polymers and DEA seem to be very sensitive to the amount of salt, especially at low pH. You could try making a sample at higher pH, to see if it emproves.
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ketchito said:@minhasshah Perhaps I’m missing something, but regular cationic guar gums don’t require activation; rather, the addition of an acididic compound (like citric acid or EDTA) helps dissolve its coating to speed up the process, letting the polymer expand and hydrate. As @Perry confirmed, salt can be the reason for the separation (that seems to be the lamellar gel on the top), but it depends on your formula. Systems containing SLES, CAPB, quaternary polymers and DEA seem to be very sensitive to the amount of salt, especially at low pH. You could try making a sample at higher pH, to see if it emproves.
Thankyou for your response. When i was talking about activation in my first comment, what i meant was activation of inactive quaternary etherifying agent. This agent has to be reacted with alkaline earth or alkaline metals. During this activation reaction for every mole of active quaternary etherifying agent, 1 mole of salt and 1 mole of water is produced. After this activation is completed the activated etherifying agent is filtered out with water. I believe this water phase has a significant amount of salt dissolved. Nonetheless, this filtrate is reacted with native guar to produce cationic guar
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@minhasshah I understand now. If your quaternary etherifying agent is 3-chloro-2-hydroxypropyl trimethylammonium chloride, then you’ll have sodium chloride as one of the reaction products (that is if you used sodium hydroxide to make your alkaline solution, which I believe is used to remove a proton from some hydroxyl group in guar gum, forming an alkoxide to act as nuclophile in the reaction). You’ll need to check which methods big manufacturers use to remove inorganic salts from your reaction mixture.
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