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Surfactant only syndet shampoo bar?
Greetings chemists:
I am new to this forum, so please excuse my naivety where apparent. My experience is only with creating a few hobbyist skincare products (mostly anhydrous).
My question in this case is motivated by personal need. After trying many different shampoos, I have concluded that I have a very sensitive scalp. Every commercial product must be including one or more ingredients to which I must be sensitive (I am wondering if its the preservatives). Even the so-called natural shampoo bars unfortunately add fragrances, oils and sometimes preservatives. I have also found that I am sensitive to old-fashioned soaps; I assume it’s because they’re too alkali for me.
I’m not desperate enough to join the “no-pooers” yet 🙂
What I am wanting to make is a syndet bar for regular shampooing, preferably with only one or two relatively mild surfactants (e.g., SCI, SCS) and little else. So two questions:
1) Is there a way to do this without any preservatives?
2) What is the best way to hold it together in solid form?
(e.g., put it in glycerin? add a small amount of soap? add some wax? Sodium Lactate? something else?)Or, if you know of such a product already in existence, I would be happy to know the name.
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7 Replies
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Swiftcraftymonkey has a booklet on syndet bars. You can purchase it for 20 Canadian dollars. Totally worth it in my opinion. However I don’t think that syndet is what you need for sensitive scalp. They are rather concentrated. Also you mentioned you would like to make it without preservatives. Do you know which preservatives cause sensitivity in your case? My point is, maybe you just need a well formulated mild shampoo preserved by parabens instead of ‘natural’ fluff?
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You can use:
Sodium
Cocoyl Isethionate (and) Stearic AcidPureact SNDT65 - Innospec
Melt it down in some Shea Butter and that’s about as simple as you can get. -
Thanks for the replies.
The interesting thing is that the rest of my skin doesn’t seem to be particularly sensitive. I have no problems with hand soap, or shaving gel or colognes. There must be something different about the scalp environment.
The problem with modern shampoos is that in an effort to create the perfect product, they have added 15-20 or more ingredients. This makes is really challenging to isolate which one (or more) of these ingredients are causing the sensitivity. This is why I thought instead of trying to figure out which ingredients, among many, are the problem, that it would be nice if I can only start with one or two.
I also have a co-worker that has a very sensitive scalp. I am surprised that no one is making a “naked” shampoo with only one or two cleaners and nothing else, for people like us. I bet there would be a small market for it.
If I create a solid bar with little to no water and it completely dries out between uses, is it still necessary to include a preservative?
It seems most shampoos include a small amount of fat, is there some reason why this is necessary or is this optional?
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It seems most shampoos include a small amount of fat, is there some reason why this is necessary or is this optional?
No.
It is more likely that you are sensitive to one ingredient - probably SLS or SLES - that’s found in 95% of shampoo. Eliminating the ‘other’ ingredients is not the problem. You should instead try a shampoo made from a radically different base. EG Use Plantaren LGC Sorb and sodium cocoamphoacetate. -
I second what Belassi said
try a different, milder commercial liquid/gel shampoo without SLS/SLES and see if it works. -
Thanks for the advice.
Tonight, I did a search for research articles on irritability and skin damage. You can see a list of the articles I found that compare surfactants at:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=SODIUM+COCOYL+ISETHIONATE
(Or go to pubmed.gov and type in sodium cococoyl esthionate (ISE) like I did)What was interesting to me, in most of these studies, is that ISE was almost as irritating as SLS and required almost as long for skin recovery as SLS. (So why then is ISE advertised as more mild, when research shows it’s so similar?)
What was also interesting was that the aionic surfactant, disodium laureth sulfosuccinate (SUL), was the least irritating, even less than cocamidopropyl betaine (CB) and the glucocides.
So this made me think of more questions:
These studies in the 90’s did not test SLSa (Lathonal). Do you think it would be similar to SUL?
Do you think one could make a shampoo with only SUL or SLSa, plus some CB?
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My niece says her head gets very itchy with most shampoos.
I agree with Belassi that it may be SLS because I made shampoo bars WITHOUT SLS, sent them to my niece, and her head is not itchy from them. (She had not done anything else to possibly correct the head itchiness.)
Yes, I know, this is only a sample size of one.
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