Bobzchemist
Forum Replies Created
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First, I’m going to recommend hiring a consultant, or getting together with a contract manufacturer that has a lab. Water-based makeup is complicated.
Second, Matt is correct. The only way to make a water-based makeup with pre-ground pigments in oil is to make a w/o emulsion. You’re going to need to find a way to suspend the pigments, though. Silica is a good starting point.
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“Need” is a relative term.Do you need a preservative, as in “Is my product at all likely to get contaminated under the majority of conditions it will come in contact with?”Or, do you need a preservative, as in “Am I likely to get sued if my product gets contaminated in an unusual situation?”Or lastly, do you need a preservative, as in “Am I likely to get in trouble if the regulatory agency in my country finds out that my product got contaminated in an unusual situation?”
The detailed answer I usually try to give is that if you are the only person that will ever use the product, and if you are comfortable taking the risk that your product might be moldy and/or bacterially contaminated, then it’s possible that you won’t do yourself any permanent harm with the product if you don’t use preservatives. But I strongly advise you (and everyone) to always use preservatives - you never know what could accidentally happen, or to whom.
It’s a bit like asking your doctor “Do I need to take these antibiotics?” after he’s diagnosed you with a bacterial infection.
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I’m trying not to be rude, but your questions reflect a frightening lack of understanding, and it’s not hard for a complete beginner to make a mistake that would hurt themselves or others. I can’t recommend that you make anything at all with information from this site.
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Stearinerie Dubois Fils696 rue Yves KermenBoulogne BillancourtIle de France 92658FrancePhone : 33-1-46-10-07-30Fax : 33-1-49-10-99-48
DUB OMEGA 6 HYDRO contain free linoleic acid and a polysorbate which give the water solubilities.
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“this is a 3 in 1 shampoo/conditioner and body soap formula”
Why do people keep trying to do this?
If you want a shampoo, make a shampoo. If you also want a conditioner, make a separate conditioner. Trying to do both at once means that you will do neither particularly well.
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80-90% of what overhead stirrers do in lab shampoo formulations is automating a manual process, i.e. stirring your batch with a stirring rod. Any kind of variable speed stirrer will do. Shampoo stirring is always done at low speeds, so there’s a minimum of foam/air in the batch. Heating is not typically used, except in some cases for a small portion of the batch, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
If you’re just doing this for yourself, and you’re not going to get into this deeply as a hobby, make your wife happy and buy a Kitchen-Aid mixer . Buy a bowl and stirrers just for shampoo, and another set for food. That way, it can be a multi-purpose tool.
Use the Point of Interest! website for formulations and manufacturing instructions.
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Here’s the thing - 99% of “active” ingredients, like essential oils or plant extracts, do absolutely nothing. This is actually a good thing, because if they did really effect the body, it would be illegal to use them in cosmetics in the US.
Make a good emulsion, get it stable, and don’t worry about the “active” ingredients.
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Press the “New Discussion” button.
Otherwise, first you grow and harvest cotton…
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Our customers were very unhappy with phenethyl alcohol and how strongly it smelled - we had to reformulate it out of our products just months after putting it in.
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Same basic rule - unless you’re making something for your own personal use that will be kept in a refrigerator and never be used by anyone else, you need a preservative in everything. No exceptions.
Unless, of course, you enjoy being sued…
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Basic rule - everything needs a preservative, always.
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I think you’d be best served by going back to your fragrance supplier with a sample of your unfragranced formula and requesting that they formulate a fragrance that does not thin it out, rather than bend over backwards trying to formulate around a fragrance that’s unsuitable for shampoo.
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USP 51 is the one I’ve always used.
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@MagicM there is a chemical reason why this can’t/won’t work, and I hope I can explain this well enough for you to explain to your client.
Chemical reactions come in two types, reversible and (normally) irreversible, Polymers are an example of an irreversible reaction - once formed, you cannot normally break a polymer back up into it’s individual monomers. (You can break it down into individual atoms, but that’s a different discussion)
“Natural” soapmaking, however is a (somewhat) reversible reaction. Fats/oils used in soapmaking are triglycerides - they have one molecule of glycerin attached to 3 molecules of fatty acids. When you expose an oil (triglyceride) to a strong base, you first get a hydrolysis reaction, which breaks the triglyceride up into its component parts. This is the irreversible part of the reaction - you won’t get the glycerin to attach the 3 molecules of fatty acids again (except under extraordinary circumstances).
Now, we get to the saponification part of the reactions. The three fatty acids are neutralized by the base (sodium or potassium hydroxide), forming ionic compounds. These compounds are what we call “natural” soap - the glycerin is irrelevant - it may or may not be left in the soap. This reaction is the part that’s easily reversible, and it is entirely dependent on pH. Below an apparent pH of about 8.0 or so, the reaction starts to reverse, leaving you with fatty acids and neutralized base that does not clean at all. So, it’s just chemically not possible for your client to have a “natural” soap at a pH of 4.5-5.0, because at that ph, soap cannot exist.
How can you compromise? Well, soap bars (as opposed to liquid soaps) don’t have an actual pH, because they don’t contain water. The “apparent” pH only shows up when you’ve dissolved the soap in water, typically at a 10% concentration. Now, you can use this to play a chemical trick - it’s barely possible to mix enough powdered acid, citric, for example, into your soap bar, at a point where it won’t interact much with the soap, so that when you dissolve the soap into water to measure the pH, you get a pH of about 7, which is neutral. If you can’t sell this to your client, you’re going to have to use surfactants other than soap.
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I know for an (unpublished) fact that “natural” soap is more stable at higher pH, but we’ve never seen any indications that it performs better in any way. I think this may be one of those cases where someone said that natural soap is “better” at higher pH, without specifying what “better” meant. Unless…if you made a soap that was incompletely reacted at lower pH, a higher pH of the same formula would mean more actual soap in the product, which would then clean better.
Things that make me go hmmm…Mike, do you have any more details?
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This discussion thread is for new members to introduce themselves. If you ask a question or make a comment about anything else, you will be ignored. If you have a question to ask, start a new discussion.
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You do understand that it’s not physiologically possible for this to actually lighten skin, right?
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I’m sorry if I was too abrupt. But what I meant was that there are only about 10 programs in the US, and some of them don’t have tuition listed, and others require you to dig deep into their websites to find out, because this information changes every year, and sometimes every semester. So, it would take about 10 actual phone calls to get this information for you. I don’t have time to do that, but you should. You didn’t ask for other options, just information on existing programs.
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Probably not. If the company didn’t make it themselves, the information about who did make it is almost certainly covered under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). That means that even if you contacted every single contract manufacturer in the US, you would be unlikely to find out.
It’s possible to duplicate a mascara formula from an ingredient label, but you’d very likely get a decent formula much faster if you told the manufacturer to just match the performance of the prototype without worrying too much about what ingredients go into it. There are probably a dozen different ways to get the same performance out of a mascara formula, and a manufacturers R&D team will have a very good idea of which formulation strategy/ingredient combinations work best for their particular configuration of processing and filling equipment.
Something that most people don’t realize about mascara which is different from almost every other cosmetic is that the performance of the finished product is affected not just by the formula of the product, but also by the way the mascara is filled into containers, and by the configuration of the container/wiper/brush system. If you are trying to duplicate the performance of a specific mascara, you must have the container/wiper/brush system already decided on, and provide it to the chemist(s) working on the project. Otherwise, the formula cannot be optimized, and the best you can hope for is a generic mascara formula.
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“Need” is a relative term.
Do you need a preservative, as in “Is my product at all likely to get contaminated under the majority of conditions it will come in contact with?”
Or, do you need a preservative, as in “Am I likely to get sued if my product gets contaminated in an unusual situation?”
Or lastly, do you need a preservative, as in “Am I likely to get in trouble if the regulatory agency in my country finds out that my product got contaminated in an unusual situation?”
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What Bill asked is critical information. Also, pigments that are that unstable to light don’t sound like any FDA-approved pigments I know of - can you disclose what you’re using?
There are Toll Processors who can custom-coat pigments, and one option would be to coat the pigments with a UV blocker before dispersing them in your formula. This would add significant costs, though.
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Generally speaking, you need to find out what a gum is not tolerant of (pH, electrolytes, alcohol, etc.) and spray the tank with it, then rinse that off with water.
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This is something that you should easily be able to check for yourself
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No, not really - it all depends on how large your batch is and how thick it gets.
Every single piece of new equipment needs to be at least roughly calibrated/dialed-in as a part of establishing a procedure for it, so you need to try it out making a few batches, and keep careful records. Once you’ve made a few batches, you should be comfortable with which settings need to be used when. This is done to one extent or another at pretty much every manufacturing facility everywhere - it’s not just you that has to do this. It’s not that hard, just start from zero and work your way up until the batch is moving around enough.
Keep in mind that the folks making these mixers aren’t making precision equipment either, and so they don’t take particular care to make sure they’re all exactly alike. As a result, a dial setting on a new one I use could produce RPM’s significantly different from what I’ve used in the past, and both could be different from the one you have, so you have to check each mixer you buy. Large companies can afford mixers with tachometers and other instrumentation built in to their mixers that make this process easier, but most of us have to do this the old-fashioned way.
You should be able to see foam visually if you’re beating air into the batch. If your finished batch has too many bubbles/too much foam, then you have a problem with your procedure somewhere. If it doesn’t, then you have nothing to worry about.