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Silica in shampoo?
While looking for ways to thicken a gel naturally, I came across this product literature for untreated fumed silica (see link below - page 13 for applications in cosmetics).
It says it is possible to thicken a shampoo with silica…has anybody done this? and how? I thought untreated silica actually thickens non-polar systems. -
4 Replies
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At a Contract Manufacturer I once worked at we did a surfactant system thickened by fumed silica. Best advice is to have a good homogenizer.
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not shampoos, but at my last workplace we routinely used a hydrophilic grade to thicken toothpastes and given them extra suspension and pseudoplasticity
because it was a very fine powder and there was 10-15% of it by weight in each batch, it was added by means of a bottom-feeding powder eductor on the plant - during addition, we kept the vessel’s side-sweep mixer running and let the friction and shear forces that resulted from the liquid’s high viscosity do the rest of the work mixing it in (if I remember rightly, it took 2-3 hours to fully mix it into a 1500kg batch)
as @Microformulation said, a high-shear mixer would be needed at lower viscosities
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I used it recently in a Sugar Scrub. I was so glad I had a Silverson otherwise it would have taken forever.
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If you can get it wetted out, untreated fumed silica thickens any liquid. A small amount of calcium silicate may be synergistic in aqueous products.
If you can afford it, Cabot makes stabilized aqueous dispersions that eliminate the need for a homogenizer and/or eductor. I suspect you’d need to use high-solid-content surfactants to make this work in a shampoo.
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