Bobzchemist
Forum Replies Created
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No, you want to dry grind the pigments first in the spice grinder. Ideally, you will use talc (if you can tolerate the opacity) or plain fine mica/sericite as a grinding aid, at a 1:1 ratio with your pigments.
Don’t use water - just don’t.
Next, you want to make a mixture of your dispersant plus your oil. You can use isododecane if you absolutely have to, but a heavier/thicker oil will work better, and shouldn’t hurt your wear too much. Heat this up if you have to melt the dispersant - I’m a big fan of Ganex WP 660 for this. Stir the pigment mixture into the hot oil/dispersant mix at a 60:40 ratio. Let it cool, then use the muller.
Remember, you have to evaluate each dispersion while you’re making it and even afterwards. If it’s too dry/crumbly, add a little bit more oil and mull it again.
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To add to Perry’s point, a lot of this information is also distributed in professional seminars or masters-level courses. The people who give the seminars certainly don’t want the information freely out on the web that they present for $1,000 to $2,000 per person - and the people who take the seminars/courses have no incentive to post it either.
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non-nano is a marketing term, really. It’s not completely meaningless, but it’s for the most part untestable as far as distinguishing between primary particles and agglomerates are concerned, unless you are going to the trouble of using a SEM.
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I agree that this is not a project to be undertaken as a first, or even a tenth, formulation project.
When you are deciding what to work on, please, please consider the potential dangers/potential damage first. Products like depilatories or skin peels=high risk of a formulation or weighing error causing severe, permanent damage. Products like sunscreen=high risk of a formulation error causing serious damage (see Jessica Alba’s Honest Company Sunscreen, for example).
Products like moisturizers, soaps, shampoos=low risk of a formulation error doing any harm. This is where you should focus your efforts to begin with. -
There’s a procedure for members here to get an account with ULProspector. Do a search of the forum.
As far as I know, you can only get the 100% material from Innospec.
An emulsifying mixture is made by Phoenix:
PHOENOMULSE™ 100(INCI: Water (and) Polyhydroxystearic acid (and) Isononyl Isononanoate (and) Ethylhexyl Isononanoate (and) Sodium Cocamidopropyl PG-Dimonium Chloride Phosphate) is the ultimate emulsion aid for delivering innovative cosmetic and personal care products. PHOENOMULSE™ 100 creates highly-stable and novel Structured Micelle Aggregate (SMA) external water phase emulsions, using medium shear warm or cold processing. Internal phase loading of up to 50% is achievable. -
Your legal department needs to understand the realities of pigment processing. When you mill/grind a product, you inevitably produce particles in a range of sizes.
In order to get a specific particle size range, you need to process the particles further, by putting them through a classifier that will reject the particles that are too large and the ones that are too small. Making sure that you have no nano particles in your Zinc Oxide isn’t too hard, as long as you don’t worry too much about how large the particles are. Making sure that your particles are just slightly larger than nano-sized to be able to say the ZnO is non-nano, but small enough to be transparent, would require 4 or 5 passes (or more) through a very precise classifier after the ZnO has been milled.
I’m not saying it can’t be done - I’m just saying that it would result in a Zinc Oxide that costs $200 - $300 per kilo.
I’m also going to point out that these consumer advocacy groups are full of used food. Consumers have been using nano-sized zinc oxide on their skin for almost a century - because the milling process needed to make ZnO not feel like sandpaper has been turning out some fraction of their output in nano-sizes all along - it’s unavoidable. The technology revolution has been the ability to make ALL of the output nano-sized.
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I would suggest getting in touch with the cosmetic chemists in Australia. There’s a SCC/ SCS there.
The good news is that if you focus exclusively on liquid lipsticks, there are huge chunks of knowledge that general cosmetic chemists need to know that you can safely ignore.
The first suggestion I’ll give you is that film-forming on skin is different than film-forming on glass or metal. Why? Because the skin can absorb some types of liquids, so that there’s potential for your film to dry faster - IF you choose the right liquids. You need to find out all you can about emollients (primarily esters) that are safe for use on the lips, don’t taste bad, and absorb quickly into the skin.
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A 2-step process will definitely be much easier.
What kind of solvent do you want to use for your topcoat?
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Are consumers really that scared by the may-be, possibly, no-actual-proof-but chemicals-scare-us crowd that there’s a significant market for non-nano Zinc Oxide sunscreen?
Also, I don’t think a commercially viable non-nano but also non-whitening zinc oxide can be manufactured. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I think that the extremely tight particle size control this would require would be so expensive that the Zinc Oxide would be incredibly more expensive than nano zinc oxide.
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For a number of products, Euxyl PE9010 needs to be at 2%. Try it at 1%, !.5%, and 2% to see where your required level is.
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Cured cold process soap can’t be melted - you’ll burn it. You can plod, extrude and stamp-mold it, or you can try to dissolve it in water, or you can grind it like Mike suggests. Otherwise, you should just toss it - soap is cheap.
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1) yes
2) What oil are you dispersing the pigments into?
3) Same thing
4) Experimentally. You will need to make many trials with different dispersing/wetting agents in order to find the one you like best.In the future, please start a new discussion, even if you are asking questions very similar to the original one.
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Try the SCC or SCS groups on LinkedIn
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$17 for one unit of lipstick? I may be in the wrong part of this business…
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Either that, or boost the pH up over 12.0. You’d probably have to change the superfat to using non-saponifiable emollients if you do that, though.
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What kind of budget do you have?
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@Arismac, if you’ll post the formula here, we’ll evaluate it for you without charge. Please start a new discussion, though.
@sarwaaldoori, I’d be happy to answer your question, but not on this discussion thread. This is for people to introduce themselves only. Please start a new discussion, hopefully with a bit more detail on your batch sizes, and we can get into this further.
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Of course, there are a great many crooked people selling “miracle goo” that claims to grow hair but actually does nothing. That’s probably a safer thing to do, even if it’s morally wrong (and illegal in some places).
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With numbers that low, I think you’d be much better off financially hiring two or three temps for a week and filling the products by hand. Any contract filler that would take this on is going to charge you an enormous amount of money to do this - I’d estimate $3 - $4 per piece.
The reason why, by the way, is cleaning and sanitization time for the equipment. On a very, very small filling line, 500 pieces might take an hour, or even two. A more commonly sized line would fill 500 pieces in ten or twenty minutes. But then the line will need to be cleaned and sanitized for the next product, and you’re going to have to pay for that time also.
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I know that there are a bunch of formulas floating around the web using glycerin as a binder for glitter, but I can’t think the wear time would be more than an hour or so. If that doesn’t bother your customers, fine, but if I were doing this, I’d look closely at silicone technology instead, and give yourself a competitive advantage.
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Also, if you do find something that actually works? It’s going to need to be a prescription-only drug in most of the world.
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Thanks, Perry!
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You need to use the same kind of mould in the lab that will be used in the production facility. Nothing else matters.
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The surfactant load for shampoo bars should be 80-100%. The 30-40% number is only for liquid shampoos. The increased surfactant level is why there’s a market for shampoo bars to begin with, so consumers don’t have to pay for the 60% water that’s in a typical liquid shampoo.
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Start a new discussion to get answers