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What country are you in?

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Thanks Michelle. I have noticed a long time back that my very first hand cream, which is based on organic shea butter, faded photo-pigmentation blotches by about 50% over several weeks of use, presumably due to the vitamin A content.

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I understand that urea can raise the typical pH of a solution by 2 points so perhaps the urea is acting to neutralise the Gl acid and as you say, act as a penetration enhancer.

I should be getting the delivery today so lots of work to do.

Thanks for the useful info! I had no idea it would be a sticky substance to use.

[belassi]

Why do you want to use such an enormous percentage of glycerin?

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I’d love to hear from anyone who has used urea. So far my research indicates that it tends to raise pH by 2 points, and also that it produces a smell of ammonia due to its tendency to decompose. But it certainly looks to have some interesting skin properties.

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Get a good scale - I paid $350 for a 2Kg scale in 0.1g increments - and also get one of those cheap Chinese jewelers scales, 0-100g in 0.01g increments, for measuring small amounts at the 0.1% end of the ingredients.

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Thanks for that. Regarding kojic acid, I noted a report that said it could cause lack of pigmentation bordering the treated area due to its effect on melanin inhibition. When I am developing a product I like to begin modestly and increase actives as I get feedback. I’ll use retinyl palmitate if I can get hold of it, and salicylic acid?

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There’s no way I would consider using hydroquinone. Or AHAs for that matter. I’m thinking of glycrrhizic acid, niacinamide, kiwi fruit, gluconic acid. 

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@matt719: You don’t need to get so complicated to begin. You will need a hotplate for melting solid lipids. You don’t need to mix anything on the hotplate and in fact to do that isn’t safe.

You should get a large microwave oven - the largest you can find, and it is vertical height inside that I am referring to. This makes a great heater of anything that contains water. Not only that, but the microwaves also sterilise the beaker so you get a really sterile result.

So melt the lipids on the hotplate and get them to the required temperature and bring up the polar materials to the required temperature and then blend using a stick blender, again the biggest damn one you can find.

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I managed to locate a new supplier in my city using quiminet. It’s a lab supplier and so the urea is reagent grade, $60 a kilo! Ouch. Still, I bought half a kilo because that will be enough to make 5Kg of test materials, adequate I think for the opening investigative phase. Usefully I also found they had genuine Pyrex beakers so I restocked my glassware. The Pyrex beakers are much thicker, far more robust than the Kimex ones, and as for Chinese glassware … don’t! It’s too fragile.

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The comments above are all 100% right on the button. You see, until you have experimented with each of these ingredients, you have no idea of their properties either individually or in combination. 

Taking someone’s LOI and trying to duplicate the product is really not easy despite what some may say, and that’s assuming a full understanding of the properties of each ingredient.

It is in my opinion much easier to design with a bottom-up approach. Then every time you add an ingredient it is easy to ascertain the effect of it. If you try to duplicate a product, it then becomes a game of (eg) “Why isn’t this thick enough? Do I need to add more of x? More of y? Or less of z?

I once tried to duplicate a body wash/hair shampoo product. It had an LOI about 30 ingredients long. I failed completely. Then I realised I should be designing my own. How on earth would I ever learn to design NEW products if I spent my time copying other people? I set to work and designed a body wash product that worked at least as well as the one I had been trying to copy, and it had nine ingredients instead of dozens.

In few words: You need to be prepared to invest a few hundred dollars in a range of standard materials, another few hundred in basic tools, and a LOT of time, and then, IF you have the talent for it - you may become a cosmetic product designer.

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You could, but the product would be entirely different and may not even work.

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Their marketing schtick has caught up with them.

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The chia oil version became a new product, “Omega cream”. We test marketed it yesterday at an expo and it sold quite well. I like it a lot.

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I don’t see any problems with what you did, regarding making the product. I do, though, see other problems that would stop me doing the same. For instance:

1. shelf life. Some oils last a year or even more. Others barely make it to three months. Your mix will have a shelf life equal to the least stable oil.

2. I use my range of lipids to make many different products, I need to keep them separate for that reason.

You have set me thinking though. I might make a standard combination for CP soap; using the oils that are stable of course, such as coconut, palm, shea butter, high-oleic rapeseed oil.

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% of an ingredient = (mass of ingredient/total mass) * 100

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The idea behind this is to reduce measuring time? I’m not sure I would want to include the emulsifier.

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Looks interesting. It will penetrate the skin if you use an appropriate carrier. If I were in that market I would try it.

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I have to admit, it got changed by my wife, who said that “jungle” had too many negative connotations in Mexico. So it ended up as “In The Woods” as I discovered when my friend who runs a large-format print business delivered them last night. The labels look great, though!

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The ones you mentioned may not even be using an acrylic base. There are other bases available. For instance (this would not be used in a nail product) one type of paint uses a two-pack formulation that actually relies on humidity in the air as a catalyst to make the paint chemically harden.

Now how would you make a nail “strengthener”? Hard to imagine.

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Mark, I have plenty of experience with those solvents but as a painter, using them to paint cars with Metalflake(tm). Nail lacquer is basically the same but in tiny amounts.

I’ll say this: water - to the point even of air humidity - is the enemy of these laquers such as ethyl acetate. For instance when spraying suspended flakes in ethyl acetate, if you do it on a humid day you’ll very likely get a ruined paint finish because it will cloud. This is what you saw yourself.

Frankly there is NO way to get any polar item into the laquer. You can only use nonpolar or dry ingredients. I doubt very much whether any additive would actually “benefit” the nail, which is only hard keratin after all. 

Oh, one more thing - be careful of personal exposure! Please! I have high sensitivity to such solvents because I failed to take adequate precautions when custom cars were my hobby.

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My own experiments led me to reject PEG-7 GC as a shampoo ingredient. It’s going back a few years, but I think I was trying to use it for a skin conditioning effect. Later I tried Lamesoft PO-65 instead and that did exactly what I was looking for at about 1 to 2% usage. I rejected propylene glycol as a shampoo ingredient quite early on, almost certainly due to foam suppression. I don’t see it on the LOI of any commonly available commercial shampoo products either. I think the oleate you’ve got on order should give a good refattening effect.

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Looking at that list, I would do a knock-out test on the propylene glycol and the PEG-7 glyceryl cocoate to see how the foam is being affected by those two.

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@NVaughn: I’m self taught although I have been a chemistry teacher in the past, so at least I understand stoichiometry and acid-base reactions and so on. However, cosmetic chemistry bears only a superficial relationship to general chemistry.

My first experiment involved using hair gel to obtain some off-the-shelf carbomer gel; organic shea butter, glycerine, some aloe vera, because that was what Evelyn & Crabtree had on the label of a tube of cream that actually worked.

To my surprise I was able to create a reasonable copy, and decided to pursue the subject.

Most of the people here are far more knowledgeable than I, although I do have a few useful specialities. I’ve posted complete formulae developed here, for anyone to use. I will help in an instant to the best of my ability a person who is developing or modifying a formula; but I find it a complete turn off if someone posts a LOI of INCI names  a yard long, typically ending in “linalool” and asks how to make it.

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I was just having a social evening with my fellow Brits here and one of them is my printer, it seems that “In The Jungle” was the one that got printed. He also said that the label looked really really nice. I have to thank one of the forum members for suggesting the herbal aroma blend; the testers report that they love it. (You might recall my question to the forum about the aroma of Tea Tree Oil, one of my scalp-health ingredients). I should have a sample run of 100 labels tomorrow, I hope, and I need to get into the lab to make 30 or 40 shampoos for the weekend expo.