Bobzchemist
Forum Replies Created
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There are plenty of alternatives, but they’re all almost impossible to buy online, since they are for professionals/corporations.
What are you trying to accomplish with your pomade project?
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TKB?
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And a muller will be nearly useless for this, by the way. Mullers are for liquid makeup and lipstick.
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NO! Do not use a mortar and pestle! (Unless you like grinding each batch of powders for 10 hours or so. In that case, go for it)
I think I figured out what’s going on.
Unless you’re making loose powders in 10 kilo lots, or have huge amounts of money floating around, you should be making them in some version of a kitchen blender. Ideally, you would pair it with an orbital mixer, but that’s not essential.
First, you need to make sure that your pigments are ground as finely as possible. You can do this yourself, by blending a 20% pigment/talc or mica dispersion over and over again, or you can buy pre-made dispersions. If you’re only making one shade for yourself, you can grind your pigment mix all together, but if you’re making multiple shades, you want to do this one pigment at a time.
Next, you want to disperse the binder into a different portion of talc (mica/sericite, etc. are also good). This will give you a concentrate that you can add to multiple batches, if you can make it large enough.
Then, blend everything together at a slow speed.
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Used motor oil is always badly contaminated. There’s no way to purify it enough to make it safe for personal care. In fact, there’s no way to purify it enough to make it safe to burn as a fuel. It’s best to just leave it be.
If you must use it as a project, how about working on a way to lock it up chemically so that it won’t contaminate the rest of the material in the landfill?
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All pump spray bottles have to use metallic springs for part of the mechanism. You might want to look into BOV (Bag-On-Valve) technology instead.
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It’s easy to create emulsifier-free nanoemulsions. Getting them to stay stable for more than 3 or 4 minutes, however, is a real challenge.
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That’s not very much water, even for a w/o emulsion.
Aluminum stearate is a soap, so it is at least one of the emulsifiers in this system. The fatty acids naturally present in beeswax can also be neutralized/saponified to form w/o emulsifiers (see Beeswax/Borax, for example) so that may be the other emulsifier even though that formulation does not have a pH adjusting agent listed.
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But wait…there’s more!
There are two other ways to think about talc replacements.
One is to just replace one powder with another, and not worry too much about skin feel - if you get the particle sizes small enough, you can’t feel the surface roughness anyway. That’s when things like starches, and modified starches, and other plant-based powders are considered. (I even spoke to someone trying to sell cork flour for this purpose once).
The second way is to consider skin feel, but from a different angle. Rather than get platelets to glide over each other, if you make the powder particles round enough, they will act like tiny ball bearings on your skin, giving you a unique feel. This is where microspheres of various sizes and compositions are considered.
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It’s not a simple decision to make.
The factor that’s primarily important is probably your profit margin. For the sake of argument, lets assume 50%, and your product sells at retail for $10. That means that you can spend no more than $5 per unit - marketing, sales, overhead, formula, packaging, labeling, testing, shipping, etc.
Typically, to get to that number, you can spend no more than $2.50 on the product and it’s associated packaging. Now you have a “buy or make” decision. It’s a large investment to set up your own manufacturing facility. What’s the ROI? Can you do better investing that money elsewhere?
You have a similar decision facing you on private label versus contract manufacturing. Private label gives you the most product for your money, but at what cost? If you want to make your own formulas later, you will have to pay extra to reverse-engineer the private label formulas. Contract manufacturing requires a greater upfront cost, but you will potentially own your own formula, which could save you money down the road. Again, what’s the ROI on that investment? Would you be better off investing that money in marketing/sales instead?
The higher your profit margin and sales volume is, the easier it becomes to justify contract manufacturing. If you envision a lower profit margin, or low sales volume, or both, then private label is the way to go, at least initially.
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It’s all about the vortex. Minimize or eliminate it and you won’t get air.
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Pure ethanol, as opposed to IPA, has very little to no odor. You might want to try it.
Otherwise, you’re out of luck. Anything more volatile than water is significantly more toxic than alcohol.
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So, I’m going to use this as a teaching moment.
To understand how to replace talc, you need to understand why it’s such a great raw material in the first place.
Talc, when ground, makes platelets - particles that have a high “aspect ratio”. Aspect ratio compares the surface area of one side of a particle to another. A mostly square particle will have a very low aspect ratio. A pancake-shaped particle will have a high aspect ratio.
Why is a high aspect ratio important? It’s all about “skin feel”. When applied to skin, high aspect ratio particles slide over each other, giving a lubricious feel.
So, one way to think about replacing talc is to find other particles that have similar shapes. That list includes Boron Nitride, Mica, Sericite, and possibly Kaolin or other clays, Barium Sulfate, and Aluminum Oxide.
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Boron Nitride
Sericite Mica (coated and uncoated)
Dry-Flo starch, etc.
Silica microsphere coated mica
treated micas
Various microspheres
Kaolin -
No - because none of those things can possibly clog pores.
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Is money/cost a factor? There are some great alternatives, but they cost big bucks.
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“I like to be able to answer intelligently when clients ask about different ‘chemical-free’ options”
Please don’t come on to a chemist’s website and say anything about “chemical-free options”. There is no such thing. Everything is made of chemicals, without exception.
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You could always go with “like dissolves like”.
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It’s an acceptable, or even a great question for a pro - I think a novice would be better off starting with single purpose products until they get a good handle on formulating.
That being said, you could look into silicone deposition from surfactants using cationic modified gums, like Jaguar C-17.
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If you’re going to do this for any length of time, it will be incredibly useful for you to understand how to work with percentages yourself. Excel or its free alternatives are a wonderful tool to assist with this.
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I’ve found Qosmedix (http://www.qosmedix.com/) to be a reliable source of both small and medium quantities of components, as well as a great source for things that you can’t get anywhere else (mascara brushes for cleaning in crevices, for example).
They ship internationally, but I don’t know how their prices will compare to an EU-based company.
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Good for you. If you can get the right mold, with some creative tinkering using one of these presses in the lab can give you an approximation of what a hydraulic press can do. The trick is to always press with the same amount of duration and force.
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You might try contacting these folks:
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When you make a pressed powder, you need a real press to apply several hundred psi, or your powder will not stay in the pan. Something like this manual one from Carver will work, but it’s very slow:
You will also need a pressed powder mold+ram, like this one:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/26mm-Compact-Powder-or-Eyeshadow-Pressed-Mold/32604969383.html?spm=2114.40010308.4.23.K82vjO The ram can be possibly be engraved deeply enough to leave a simple design in the powder, but it will be costly.
You can’t do this by hand without a press and get consistent results.
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What are you trying to do?
