[Bill_Toge]

candelilla wax and beeswax are very hard, high-friction materials; if you can get hold of castor wax / hydrogenated castor oil, add it at around 5%, drop the candelilla wax and beeswax, and increase your cetearyl alcohol to around 25% 

the castor wax will gel the product and give it more thermal stability

also, I’d remove Olivem 1000; as there’s no water in the formula it doesn’t serve any useful purpose

[Bill_Toge]

tap water is not sterile - depending where it’s sourced from, and the ambient temperature, it can be crawling with microbes

[Bill_Toge]

there’s nothing hazardous on that list, so it wouldn’t have been for that reason

the only practical point of contention is that  phenylpropyldimethylsiloxysilicate appears to have only one manufacturer (Momentive Performance Materials) and if they had supply/process problems, that would make the product harder to manufacture

I recall there was a worldwide silicone shortage a few years ago - it’s possible the manufacturer had trouble sourcing the material during the shortage, temporarily discontinued the product and never brought it back

the other possibility is that it was discontinued for commercial reasons, as sadly happens all too often when companies employ a lot of twitchy-fingered marketing staff desperate to ‘innovate’ and make their mark on the company

[Bill_Toge]

xanthan gum works well in acidic conditions - even in hydrochloric acid-based toilet cleaners with a pH around 0-1

[Bill_Toge]

not unless you’re an earthworm, an amphibian or a newborn Julia Creek dunnart

[Bill_Toge]

that’d be VA/Crotonates Copolymer, a.k.a. Luviset CA 66/Vida-Care VAC

it’s a resin that shrinks on drying, increasing tension on the hair and promoting curl growth; the drying process is greatly accelerated by heat

[Bill_Toge]

again, it’s effectively non-nucleophilic, so it’s likely to have minimal if any reactivity

it’d be quite a different story if you were using hydrobromic or hydroiodic acid

[Bill_Toge]

Perry said:

@Bill_Toge - thanks! Admittedly, this is the kind of question we farmed out to our QA/QC department. It seemed they routinely ran IR on everything. Your solution is much more elegant!

no worries!

infamously I once had a colleague who insisted on taking an IR spectrum of sodium fluoride, which is completely invisible in IR, so the spectrum showed nothing but the air

I can only conclude she either slept through the organic/inorganic labs at university or forgot about them completely once she’d left

[Bill_Toge]

in my experience a combination of hydrogenated castor oil and hydrophilic fumed silica (e.g. Aerosil 200 / CabOSil M5) works well

[Bill_Toge]

what kind of packaging are you using?

[Bill_Toge]

in my experience, SLES is stable down to pH 3 (not tried any lower than that) - if the acid is non-nucleophilic, e.g. citric or lactic, ethers can’t easily be hydrolysed

[Bill_Toge]

if it’s around 26-28% w/w, chill some of it to 0-5°C - SLS will solidify before it gets that cold, while SLES will remain liquid

@Perry IR wouldn’t be much use in this case - the C-O stretches in aliphatic  ethers occur at low wavenumbers (1100/cm or less), making them hard to distinguish from the “white noise” often found in that region

[Bill_Toge]

my prime suspect is stearamide AMP - amines are terrible for discolouring both over time and at high temperatures

[Bill_Toge]

try adding glyceryl caprylate - it’s a good intermediate between the strictly hydrophobic and the strictly hydrophilic

[Bill_Toge]

speaking as an former employee of a subcontractor for Unilver/Alberto Culver, I can say that steareth-2 and steareth-21 were both included in their products at 2-5%, and we had no problems with emulsion stability

(the granulation issues we had due to one of the resins precipitating above 35 °C in aqueous products, and the minimum filling temperature being 45 °C, were an entirely separate matter)

[Bill_Toge]

put it another way: the amount of heat energy in a given batch is governed by how much volume there is in that batch, and the material loss from that batch by evaporation is governed by how much of the batch’s surface area is open to the atmosphere

assuming your batch is roughly hemispherical, as per standard reactor designs, then the volume is proportional to the radius of the vessel cubed, while the surface area exposed to the air proportional to the radius of the vessel squared; as the size of the vessel increases, the amount of surface area per unit volume decreases, and the so the amount of water loss decreases too

[Bill_Toge]

AbbasMo said:

Bill_Toge said:

you’re best off using a dispersion rather than the dry powder; the powder needs to be milled very thoroughly to get the full depth of colour, and if you use a dispersion, the manufacturer will already have done the hard work

Thanks, I can’t understand your mean.
What’s dispersion procedure? Do we need a particular mean?

what I’m saying is that you’d be better off buying a pre-prepared black iron oxide dispersion (e.g. OD75BJE from Kobo Chemicals) than trying to grind it yourself

[Bill_Toge]

chemicalmatt said:

Hey kids, thanks for all the kudos; and I have missed Belassi and BobZ too. I know Bob is still toiling away in the USA “Contract Manufacturing Vortex” where I’ve spent most of my career. Thanks for mentioning us all @abierose and you are most welcome. We can’t take it with us into the beyond, so Perry’s forum gives a vehicle for that knowledge share. I’ll extend my own gratefulness to @Bill_Toge, another crafty veteran like @MarkBroussard and myself. Bill has been a font of knowledge here. 

better late than never, but many thanks bud, I do my best!

[Bill_Toge]

if you keep your vessels closed when not adding materials, and minimise the size of the head space above the surface of the batch, water loss will be proportionately very low, especially when compared to the lab scale

[Bill_Toge]

there’s an awful lot of potassium sorbate in there, that’ll not help with emulsion stability - plus, it’ll turn the product brown

[Bill_Toge]

phenoxyethanol is stable up to 120 °C; I wouldn’t recommend using DMDM hydantoin above about 60 °C

[Bill_Toge]

you’re best off using a dispersion rather than the dry powder; the powder needs to be milled very thoroughly to get the full depth of colour, and if you use a dispersion, the manufacturer will already have done the hard work

[Bill_Toge]

zinc oxide is best used in W/O and anhydrous products, as it’s quite basic in aqueous solution and can cause preservation issues (it fixes the pH around 7-8 and an enormous amount of acid is required to lower it)

when used as filters, titanium oxide and zinc oxide are limited to 25% w/w in Europe, both in nano and non-nano forms

also Tinosorb S / Escalol S / Parsol Shield (INCI bis-ethylhexyloxyphenol methoxyphenyl triazine) is a good broad-spectrum filter that behaves well in O/W emulsions, and has a transparent finish

[Bill_Toge]

to my mind ascorbyl isostearate is better, as the molecular weight is lower and you get more active material per % w/w

plus you only have one ester group instead of four, so it acts more quickly

[Bill_Toge]

how much iron oxide (which is Fe3O4, strictly speaking) are you using?

believe me, if you put enough of it in you can make your mascara very black indeed