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940 is useless with anionic surfactants.

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Are there any alternatives for LYE (sodium hydroxide). 

 - NO. Solid bar soap is made with it. Liquid soap with potassium hydroxide.

Don’t get confused between commercial soap made with synthetics and natural soap made from fatty acids.

I strongly recommend that you join a soap forum like this one. Making soap is not very difficult, it is a bit of an art form. It does require attention to safety. The qualities of natural soap depend on the oils used. A good basic recipe is 33% coconut, 33% palm, 30% high-oleic oil such as olive, 4% castor.

You should make simple types first to get some practice. Your second recipe, for instance, is not for beginners as it would require you to freeze the goat’s milk or a runaway reaction would begin.

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Because it is perfectly miscible and forms a clear solution.

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Try a water dispersible silicone such as Silsense DW-18.

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I seriously hope that the person concerned is not a current member of this site.

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This is terrible. That’s probably three people already just on this forum. I suggest you all compare data such as email addresses, etc. to see if you can locate this person. And I also suggest that you all contact the relevant police department because it is fraud.

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STICK FORMULATION NO. 22
7% sodium stearate
65% alcohol
25% propylene glycol
3% cyclomethicone

This one? Follow the blog instructions.

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We use a local paqueteria service to deliver next day in our metropolitan area, which has a population of around 5 million. The service offers COD which many customers prefer.

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The FDA’s attitude is extreme, compared to other countries. I can’t think of anywhere else that regulates claims like that. And I don’t understand how they justify it. Just one example, I was studying urea and there is no doubt, you can use it to make structural changes to the dermis. There are plenty of studies. But according to the FDA if you claim that your cosmetic containing urea does that, you are now marketing an OTC drug and breaking the law? That is a complete oxymoron.

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Amazing, I was just looking at the Triplantanol site. Does Willie Nelson know about it, I wonder?

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Oh well. Contacted MAFCO and the kind people there are sending me samples tomorrow

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Glycerine being a polar ingredient I don’t think will give the result. The CO ester is at the wrong end of the table, it’s too light. Maybe Schercemol 1688 or ICS. I’ve got some SHS here and it certainly leaves an oily film on the skin like mineral oil would but it’s semi-solid.

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When you use a spreadsheet, it is convenient to calculate the water % automatically. That way when you adjust or add a component the water % is recalculated so you immediately have the new formula. Basically:

List the ingredients with their percentages.

SUM those.

Subtract the sum from 100 and that’s the water percentage.

Then you can put a column in which you simply enter the required batch weight, and the spreadsheet produces a column with all the ingredient weights listed.

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Way cool! Yes, you found the same abstract that gave me this idea. I also found one more item; in a transexual forum. A man transiting to female also found the same study, formulated it, and used it successfully. Great analysis, many thanks for that, it makes sense. I do intend trying the original simple formula first of all.

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@braveheart: totally agree. I suspect the FDA has this regulation solely to protect “big money” drug industry players.

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glycyrrhizic acid is definitely what I have stuck in the damn customs right now… one of the first tests will be stability testing to check for pH change, right enough!

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I’ve investigated similar botox-like “vege botox” ingredients in the recent past and concluded they were just too eye-wateringly expensive. If they work.

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$26 a kilo, x6 = roughly $150/kilo, = 17 x cream jars, $9 per jar (contents) - not expensive.

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Continuing with lab tests. The 10% solution shows no sign of degrading, no ammonia smell. PH = 5.5 in solution. I added sufficient 18% NaOH to raise the pH to 9, and there was still no sign of ammonia, which surprised me because if I tried that with, say, ALS, I would definitely have got ammonia. So it appears to me that urea is reasonably stable.

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This is a very complicated topic and one that I am dealing with myself. I think you need to consider where you want to end up. My own progress with our small company has been to first develop a range of tested products and then to decide to enter the larger market.

The first main issue is branding. Creating a brand has taken a lot of time, even with support from local government. The brand name has to be submitted and is liable to challenge from any names vaguely similar. If you want quick brand name approval you will have to pick something really unique. My own brand isn’t finally approved yet.

Secondly is how customers buy in your country. If (as in the UK for instance) people are really used to buying online, then you don’t really need to get into a retail environment but could market entirely online using a delivery service. This approach requires excellent Web skills and you’ll almost certainly need a branding and graphics designer plus a shopping platform (e.g. Shopify)

In my country people haven’t begun buying online yet but we decided to invest in an online shopping system anyway so as to stay ahead of the curve.

A startup approach we have used is to participate in Sunday markets and shows. This allows test marketing of your products in small quantities without the risk of having a product recall if something goes wrong. I also recommend contacting beauty bloggers and sending samples to them - ONLY when you are very confident and have great customer feedback because if you get it wrong the adverse Web publicity can put you out of business.

You need to consider your market position against the herd. As an example of how to do it wrongly, I wasted a lot of time creating a super nice hand soap in a 250mL soap-dispenser (pump) bottle. The minimum price we could sell it at was $4.50 (because of the expensive package) and you can find similar items in a supermarket for around $1. Of course, the contents are SLS/SLeS/CAPB salt thickened and nowhere near as nice, but you know that price will beat customer benefit perception every time. It doesn’t make sense for me to design products like that because I can’t afford to buy 10,000 containers, 10,000 labels and 500 Kg of surfactants or for that matter put all that together and find markets for it - and I can’t get anywhere the price of the big companies.

So, it makes sense for me to design products that use expensive technologies so that the packaging cost is a small fraction of the overall cost and it is easy for us to make small quantities of expensive items as compared with large quantities of cheap items; and niche products that the big companies aren’t interested in.

I hope some of this is of use.

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Any retail outlet is going to want a bar-coded product, so you might investigate the procedure for registering bar codes and add a code to the label.

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Sometimes I think a good solution would be to buy something like this on EBay and have a local engineering company fab an adjustable stand for it and fit a 3-jaw chuck for impellers. Add a variable DC power supply and a stainless bowl, and you’ve got a pretty good mixer.

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The lanolin and the safflower seed oil.

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I just tested a 10% solution on myself. It wasn’t sticky and there was no ammonia smell. It was very moisturising, visible improvement in skin texture.

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It is possible to make a liquid crystal structure with surfactants that resembles a very firm jelly but it will break apart if used in a shower. I have made something like that by accident, creating a large transparent very firm jelly ball. It wasn’t good to wash with and it did break apart. I really doubt that you will have success with a product like that. Best of luck!