[belassi]

A commercial example of liquid soap is crazy Dr. Bonner’s peppermint soap. Have you ever tried to read the label??? CRAZY! 

LOI from their Web site: Water, Organic Coconut Oil, Potassium Hydroxide, Organic Olive Oil, Mentha Arvensis, Organic Hemp Oil, Organic Jojoba Oil, Organic Peppermint Oil, Citric Acid, Tocopherol.

- Quite simple actually because some of these things are just eye candy. I’d say the “Mentha Arvensis” is an essential oil and therefore <1% which means that the hemp and jojoba oils are only there for label appeal.

[belassi]

Perhaps you are lucky enough to live in an area where the water is very soft. Liquid soap is terrible in a hard water area because it will leave your hair with Ca and Mg salts stuck to it.

[belassi]

MEA seems to be compatible with CP soap so I would surmise that DEA is also likely to be (the pH is about right). I don’t see the point though of using natural soap, it is nowhere near as suitable as a synthetic shampoo.

[belassi]

Add 2% cetrimonium chloride. Gets the job done with minimum fuss.

[belassi]

OK. Now that the test batch has cooled and potted and had a play with it, I have the distinct impression that substituting glycerol monostearate with Emulgin VL75 has radically reduced soaping, improved play time, and given better sensorials in general.

[belassi]

The latest test batch has a few changes. I’ve replaced the emulsifier with a more exotic one, and replaced part of the mamey oil with an ester, SHS. The excess stickiness has gone now. This one is a pretty thick cream, high in lipids, has great sensorials - feels super nice to spread out - absorbs in minutes leaving a velvet feel.

Now:

   Polar phase:

Water 80%

Glycerine 1%

d-Panthenol 1%

Green Tea Extract 0.2%

   Nonpolar phase

Mamey oil 3%

Stearic acid 2%

Cetyl alc 2%

Cetearyl alc 5%

Vitamin E 0.5%

Silsense DW-18 0.1%

Fragrance 0.2%

Emulgin VL75 2%

SHS ester 2%

parabens 0.4%

fragrance 0.2%

[belassi]

MacTac is the best material I’ve found for plastic product labels. It sticks really well and is a little bit stretchy.

[belassi]

This information is contained in published market reports but they cost quite a lot to buy. You haven’t specified which market zone.

[belassi]

Surely this is not a W/O emulsion but an O/W emulsion with water at 68%?

Insufficient emulsifiers.

[belassi]

I understand what your problem is Lara but unfortunately can’t help with w/o. Sorry.

[belassi]

Can you make ‘sticky’ posts, Perry?

[belassi]

Anyone wanting to try their hand at this formula should be able to get pretty close by substituting Argan for Mamey. The missing % components are all actives (hydrosols).

[belassi]

Thanks. 

The formula is still a bit sticky which I don’t like, despite eliminating the polysorbate-80.

I think the mamey oil (little information available on this, it is a relative of Argan) contains a lot of unsaponifiables, which I suspect are glycerides. Therefore I think I will reduce the glycerine from 3% to 1% and increase water by 2%.

Then I will make versions with 0.5%, 0.3%, 0.1% and 0% silicone ester, and see if I can make a viscosity curve.

INGREDIENT~~~~~~~~~~OLD~~~~~NEW

mamey oil ~~~~~~~~~~~~~5%~~~~~~5%

cetearyl alcohol ~~~~~~~~~3%~~~~~~5%

cetyl alcohol ~~~~~~~~~~~1%~~~~~~2%

stearic acid ~~~~~~~~~~~~1%~~~~~~2%

vitamin E ~~~~~~~~~~~~~0.5%~~~~0.5%

Silsense DW18 ~~~~~~~~~0%~~~~~CALIBRATE

fragrance 0.2%

glycerol monostearate ~~~~~2%~~~~~2%

The polar components include water at 78% glycerin at 1% and panthenol at 1%.

[belassi]

If you could use a quat, then Quaternium-60 is based on lanolin. I use it to give split-end repair in our conditioner.

[belassi]

If someone were to ask me to develop, say, a therapeutic cosmetic formula, I’d have to look at a lot of different issues.

1. There are bound to be a number of ingredients that the client finds desirable, that I don’t have and can’t obtain, so I would find it necessary to specify that the client would be responsible for making those available. For instance, it could be that I might use local ingredients not available to the client, which would be far worse.

2. The price would depend on the probable development time. For instance, if someone were to ask me for a hair gel (fixative) with UV protection, I’d probably quote about 6 hours dev time. But if someone asked me to develop a psoriasis cream … well, that would be open ended (and to be frank, yes, I have been developing a psoriasis treatment. Without success.)

[belassi]

I have been wondering about thickeners. Wax no, for two reasons; one, hard for me to obtain. Two, concern over propensity to cause acne. Probably a carbomer will work well. But first I will try to calibrate the effect of the silicone ester on viscosity versus percentage.

[belassi]

This is why I gave up the idea of using carbomer as a shampoo thickener. IMO it is useless unless you’re happy with trapped bubbles. Anyway, the shear characteristics of carbomer lead to a horrible hand-feel, and the pH limitations are yet another problem.

[belassi]

Yes Lara, the original formula used 50% of the amount of lipids but no silicone and was a medium-viscosity cream, quite suitable for a face cream but a little too thin for a hand cream.

I was reading the bulletin for Silsense DW-18, a silicone ester that’s water dispersible and acts as a co-emulsifier, and I noted the data on making a microemulsion with it.

So, I doubled the amount of lipids and emulsifer thinking “this will be pretty damn thick” and added 0.7% of DW-18 and it came out as thin as water. It is still white though. This product would be useless in a traditional pot, would be ok as a sprayable. I’m not sure in which direction to go with it, I might progressively reduce the percentage of DW-18 and record how the viscosity changes.

These silicone esters seem way different to traditional silicones. For instance I use a quarter percent of Polytrap in my hand cream and it produces a nice dry-but-silky effect. However, the DW-18 silicone ester appears to be absorbed by the skin, since even after quite aggressive hand washing, the silky feel of the silicone can be detected days later.

I hope the above comments might be of use to you.

[belassi]

Oh yeah sure I have tried it. First trip across Lagos lagoon in my speedboat. Ran aground. A fishing family came past in a log canoe. The old guy chuckled at my predicament and said in Pidgin English, “Dry Water!”

[belassi]

Regarding print shops:

One of my friends runs a print shop. It is what they call a “large format” printer; they make printed vinyl canvases that get really huge. I can’t recall what size bed their largest printer is but it looked about 10ft across.

There are small print shops that you find everywhere these days on street corners. (Well, here, maybe not in the USA) but what you want to watch out for is that these very often cut corners by using grey-market inks. You can usually tell because the place will stink of dangerous solvents if they’re into that. And their printers generally can’t get the resolution the larger print shops can.

The big print shop if asked nicely will be able to do a short run for you at the same or better price of a corner shop, and with better quality.

[belassi]

The problem with trying to do labels in-house is that you really can’t get proper professional quality.

Inkjets are useless because they cannot print on to plastic. Printing on paper looks completely amateurish and paper labels fall apart in the bathroom.

Colour Laser printers, you would think, will get the job done. But they don’t, actually. The problem is that they don’t get the fuser temperature high enough to reliably fuse the image on to a professional material such as MacTac. I have tried it using my CP1525 a HP laserjet that produces great 600dpi colour prints but on MacTac… it looks great but even with the fuser set to max temp, the print rubs off in normal use.

Also bear in mind that you cannot buy professional label material in letter or A4 size sheets, it comes in large sheet formats and needs to be cut to size to use in a home printer.

And not only that, but cutting and peeling curved labels is a time-consuming nightmare that will give amateurish results, believe me.

Which is why, when I have a new product, I print maybe a dozen temp labels on the colour laser - for photography - and then I ask a local print shop to run me off 100 or 200 or whatever I need. The labels come pre-cut, just pull and stick.

For large runs in the thousands you will probably find it economical to source labels on a roll from China.

[belassi]

Can’t you ask for samples?

[belassi]

I hate to say this, but … the forum is for cosmetics. I’ve no idea about things like that.

[belassi]

Oh wow, vapour deposition. I nearly got killed doing that in a government lab; I was only 17 at the time. The previous technician removed the earth connection, so when the electron furnace shorted out because of a molten metal splash, I got 7,000 volts. Basically it’s a big vacuum chamber with an electron furnace to boil off the metal vapours.

[belassi]

Maybe I should make it into a different product. “Satin Skin for a Nite of Delite”