belassi
Forum Replies Created
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I would rather not contract the coronavirus and die, than have trouble with Chinese supplies. The videos I have seen today… the news media is suppressing the truth.
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No, you don’t. However… not all surfactants are equally good as emulsifiers. And not all oils, when emulsified by surfactants, yield a clear solution. This also applies to fragrance oils. It is important to mix the oil with the surfactant prior to dilution.
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Never had a problem and I’ve bought from China, India, Japan…
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Shampoos ARE emulsifiers…
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If you want a clear soap you can only use lipids whose salts are soluble in water. PLEASE do the research. It’s not rocket science.
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Try it and see. I doubt it.
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It is. If you get a vapour leak, large amounts of pure ethanol vapour can rapidly accumulate ready for ignition. And ethanol vapour is quite corrosive to seals.
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Sorry… thanks for making me laugh. “Violet” eh? Sulphate free, eh?
Let me tell you a little story.
Once upon a time I designed a sulphate free shampoo. It was based on an Akypo surfactant, a carboxylate that was anionic or cationic depending on pH. And a couple of secondary surfactants, CAPB and whatever.
I went to one of the local factors to buy fragrances and dyes and thought, this violet one will be cute for my sulphate free shampoo.
And it was very cute. And the fragrance was, too.
I made a batch of about 40 and took them to a farmer’s fair type event.
It was a nice sunny day.
You’re already ahead of me aren’t you?
I knew it.
So, hardly had I arranged all the 400mL Eurostyle bottles of shampoo on the display, than the sun came out, and kind of like a wave, they all changed colour, in minutes, from violet to a kind of olive green.
It wasn’t muddy or unattractive, fortunately, but it did clash with the label.
Just treat your experience as a life lesson and don’t try for violet, is my advice. Only the royals can pull it off. -
Parabens was so useful before consumers turned against it. Inexpensive. Didn’t appear to cause sensitisation. Methyl for the water phase and higher ones like propyl for the oil phase. Low % was effective. Not pH sensitive. Long lasting effect. Odour free. And so on. (sigh)
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I’ve never had a problem and I use it as reinforcement for the preservative system. I suppose it depends on your emulsification system.
Quite frankly this article (link) was useless to me. The minimal information given says nothing about the emulsifer except that it was a ‘non ionic surfactant’. Hell, that could be glyceryl stearate or it could be CAPB for all we know. And, emulsifying paraffin?? That is not representative of anything I am interested in. -
Very interesting, thanks. I’ll have to test my five year samples… we were using parabens in those days. I opened one a few weeks ago and it still seemed perfect. Not that I am putting a 5 year old emulsion on my skin.
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Having once run a still, in my view the most dangerous thing about any production involving ethanol, is the fire / explosion risk and the intoxication risk via the respiratory tract. I once dropped a one gallon dewar of 90% ethanol on a tile floor and broke it. The alcohol evaporated within seconds and the air became saturated with it. Fearful of an explosion I rushed around flinging windows open and then exited myself, but I was already staggering drunk from inhaling it. I’ve seen COSMOS formulations on suppliers sites with up to 40% ETOH. This poses problems even at small scale but can you imagine even a medium scale production facility being allowed to do that?
One more point. The ethanol I produced was quadruple distilled and filtered through a 1.2m column of activated charcoal. It had a very low % of other volatiles and in fact, you could get drunk on it with little or no hangover. However. If you are using ethanol in production, how pure is it? Any methanol content is deadly poisonous. Methanol is readily absorbed through the skin. -
Without knowing what surfactant combo you are using it’s impossible to comment, sorry.
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I have never found anything yet in which cetyl cannot be more usefully be replaced by cetearyl.
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I think it might be true that consumers have tried the products and found they don’t perform as well. It cost a lot to produce a sulphate-free formula (I don’t mean development time, although that too was long). Thickening was such a problem, the only method that produced really good sensorials was the expensive Glucamate VLT. The Akypo primary surfactant wasn’t cheap either. And in the end, our anionic ALS-based shampoos outperform it.
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There are different types of parabens. You would use methyl for the water phase and butyl or propyl for the nonpolar component, usually in a ratio of 2:1.
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parabens.
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Our customers want something different, it seems. These days we mainly sell two shampoos, the Tea Tree and the Coffee.
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@Agate: Yes, exactly.
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Agree with Bill. It’s more complicated than it looks, because some surfactants tend to be ‘draggy’ on the skin (glucosides, SLES) and if the sensorials are poor, the consumer uses more of the product, which can cause defatting. TBH, shampoo design is really difficult compared to skin creams. (YMMV)
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To begin with, change the coconut oil to a blend with more oleic and less stearic etc., begin with a 50-50 olive oil/coconut oil blend and see how that turns out. You’ve probably got too many solids in there too.
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Good grief.
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You will have to experiment. Obviously Glucamate LT or VLT would be useless because they are dissolved in propanediol. Although, wait… as supplied, Glucamate VLT has exactly the consistency you require. You could try using it as a direct replacement for propanediol, and add small amounts of water to thicken it. (It produces very thick solutions at around 4 to 5% of GVLT)
The price, though… -
God alone knows. You will have to ask them.
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It’s old fashioned, expensive, and does a very poor job. You can make a modern cleaner, biodegradable, streak free, that is basically 99% water. I don’t see why you would want to waste money.