Bobzchemist
Forum Replies Created
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It’s hard to know where to begin…to start with, as a general rule, the more pigment and other powders you use, the tackier and draggier your product will be. You have to balance this against the drawback of this behavior, which is that the more pigment and other powders you use, the thicker and harder to pour/pump your product will become. A good pigment dispersant, like Anatron/Ganex WP-660 polymer (Triacontanyl PVP) will help mitigate the viscosity increase, to a point.
So, the first thing I’d try would to be to run a 5 or 10 batch experimental series that increases your powder load incrementally.The next thing I’d try would to be to run a 5 batch experimental series that adds/increases a pigment dispersal aid incrementally.I also don’t understand your last comment - about 80% of the formula you listed is synthetic - why is this an issue? -
Here’s another example, again based on what @Iaskedbetter wrote:
BAD: I’m having trouble dispersing my pigments in a BB cream formulation. Can I use Salacos HS-6C?BETTER: I’m having trouble dispersing my pigments in a BB cream formulation (Insert formula and percentages). Anyone know if I should try Salacos HS-6C (INCI: Polyhydroxystearic Acid)?BEST: I’m having trouble dispersing my pigments (list of pigments and percents) in 500ml of BB cream formulation (Insert formula and percentages) after 15 minutes of homogenizing with a Silverson L4RT mixer using the square-hole screen at 3,000rpm and at 60C. After homogenizing, I stir down to room temperature at 50rpm using a paddle stirrer, which takes about an hour. When the batch is finished, it looks beige/light brown, but turns dark brown when I rub it into my skin. Does anyone know if I should try Salacos HS-6C (INCI: Polyhydroxystearic Acid) for better pigment dispersal? Is there anything else that someone could recommend? Is my procedure OK? -
@NVaughn, I think @MarkBroussard has it right. Here’s an example I came up with, based on what @Iaskedbetter wrote:BAD: HELP! My cream is not stable! I’m using (ingredient X). Why is my cream failing? What can I do to fix it? I can’t tell you any more about the other ingredients because I want to keep my formula secret!BAD: HELP! My cream is not stable! I’m using (incomplete list of ingredients). Which ingredient is wrong?BAD (but slightly better): HELP! My cream is showing separation at 45C. Anybody know why? I’m using (complete list of ingredients, but no percentages).GOOD: My cream is showing separation at the top of the glass stability jar in 45C after 1 week and I’m not sure why. Here is the formula: (Insert formula and percentages)Here is how I am making it: (Insert batching procedure and equipment settings)Anyone have any thoughts?
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Sorry about the formating glitches.
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buy 200kg drums of xxxx from a supplier the USA if you are are only making 200
gram batches at home in Europe. -
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Procedures, equipment info and/or sources, etc. This is all info you will have
to pay a consultant for. -
There’s a reason why all of the lipstick manufacturers have only a few lipstick bases, even the major ones - it’s really difficult and time consuming to come up with a good one.
On top of that, unless you can afford to buy your waxes by the pallet-load, it’s usually cheaper to buy a pre-made base, even if you wind up tweaking it with waxes and/or emollients to personalize it.@Luminessence, streaking and layering can be from poor suspension, pouring too cold, or pouring with too great a temperature difference between the molten lipstick and the lipstick mold.I’ve worked at places where they’ve had to pre-heat the mold, pour the lipstick, and then quickly transfer the filled mold to a freezer/cooling tunnel, all to get the right texture and suspending ability.A lack of slip and glide is usually a problem with the ratio between your wax content and your emollient content. It can also be an issue if your emollient cascade is too heavily weighted towards fast-absorbing emollients. Magnesium or aluminum stearate won’t usually help, unless you can get the stearates to help gel the stick which would let you reduce the wax level.If you absolutely must make your own base from scratch, first get 3 or 4 base formulas from the usual culprits, make them exactly, and then evaluate them. After that, make some small changes to each, and re-evaluate. You will be surprised at how much difference a small change makes - lipstick base formulas are notoriously finicky. -
Try some humectants - glycerin, sorbitol, etc. replacing some of the water.
This will inevitably raise your cost, so you will need to balance the increased cost against the messier container. For most situations, lower cost trumps (potentially) happier consumers. -
There is NO difference. Sounds like your boss needs that link too.
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Neutralizing is the general term. Saponifying is the term we use specifically when we neutralize a fatty acid.
A soap is simply the salt formed from neutralizing one or more fatty acids with a base, typically sodium or potassium hydroxide.Saponifying can also be used as a slightly more general term, where it incorporates the process of splitting a triglyceride into it’s component fatty acids + glycerin and then neutralizing those fatty acids.So, since saponifying and neutralizing are talking about the same chemical process, you can see that there will be no difference.It would probably help you to do some reading on the subject: -
In the US, this can be very, very expensive. Do you already have an analytical method developed for your formula, or will you need one developed for you?
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First, it’s almost always more cost effective to buy lipstick base, rather than make your own (unless you’re running your own factory).
Second, the way to make a glossy lipstick matte or satin is to add a material that evenly breaks up the smooth, glossy film on the lips. Typically, that is a microsphere, so that you can matte the lipstick and improve the skin feel at the same time.Using a pre-made base and pre-ground pigment dispersions make formulating lipstick much easier - you do still need to remember to keep the total oil absorption of all your powders as close as possible from shade to shade so that the skin feel stays similar across your line. -
@joseg, try using potassium hydroxide.
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Sigh…I see this a lot too.
Here’s the problem - given enough mixing energy, you can turn any mixture of oil and water into an emulsion, with or without emulsifiers. Without emulsifiers, that emulsion will fall apart. The instability may show up within hours, days or sometimes even weeks. -
Sodium AMPS is a cross-linked polymer.
This discussion is veering dangerously close to the “information you should have to pay a consultant for” line. You need to either do your own research, or hire someone to do it for you. This is not a site where we give out enough free information that someone could start a business, nor is it a place where we will usually be very helpful to random strangers. -
“IN the jungle” might not be exactly the image you’re looking for. Maybe “From the jungle”? Or, since it’s associated with Australia, something that evokes that sort of image instead?
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I will confess that, in a moment of exasperation (with Marketing), I once combined two finished products (after Marketing had repeatedly rejected my efforts to make something “halfway between them”) and, much to my shock, Marketing approved the mixture. At the place I was working at the time, once you had Marketing Approval, everything was set in stone. So, this product wound up with twice the number (but half the amount) of emulsifiers, actives, preservatives, etc. Later, I found out that this was not an uncommon practice. When you see a large or confusing LOI, don’t discount this type of shortcut as a possibility - many formulators, operating under typical tight schedules, don’t have time to weed out the useless ingredients.
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The PCPC Buyers guide presents some alternatives: (which brings up the question - do you have to use chicken eggs?)
Search for “egg”, ignore the results using “eggplant” -
This is going to be hugely expensive, and time-consuming, but try Avomeen. http://www.avomeen.com/services/deformulation
I will have to point out that no test exists that can tell the difference between a certified organic ingredient and one that derives from non-organically grown plants.If you are only concerned that some or all of the ingredients are synthetic/petroleum derived, rather than plant-derived, there is a simple and inexpensive test that can tell, although it does not tell you which specific ingredient is the culprit. It’s based on the carbon-14 dating tests used for archeology, and detects if there are any petroleum-derived carbon atoms. It’s the same test used to qualify products for the USDA’s Biopreferred/Biobased program (http://www.biopreferred.gov/BioPreferred/faces/Welcome.xhtml?faces-redirect=true)This is one of the labs: -
Please be aware that none of these are FDA-compliant colorants.
On the other hand, many nail-polish manufacturers claim that they are not subject to FDA colorant regulations, since their products do not contact the skin. Hence their use of things like glitter, and neon pigments, among others.Personally, I wouldn’t take the risk. -
This one specifically mentions BPA-Free:Or, check with these folks:
http://olikrom.com/en/olikrom-products/thermochromic-pigments/
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Bisphenol A is a plasticizer/antioxidant, not a pigment. It has no color. At all. On top of that, it’s soluble in a bunch of different chemicals, so that makes it doubly not a pigment.Whoever your pigment supplier is is likely selling you pigment chips - pigment mixed with a resin which uses BPA as a plasticizer/antioxidant. You should be able to get the same pigment/resin mix made with a cosmetically acceptable plasticizer/antioxidant instead.Let us know more details, and we will try to come up with a solution for you.
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That ingredient list is clearly fraudulent and non-compliant, so I doubt you could trust anything on it.
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Experimentation is one of the keys to success in cosmetic chemistry. I’ll give more details on
that below.One of the others is knowing your raw materials. At a bare minimum, you should have a
Technical Data Sheet (TDS), a Specification Sheet and/or a Certificate of
Analysis, and a Safety Data Sheet (formerly a MSDS) for each and every one of
your ingredients. Ideally, you would have read and kept a copy of all of the
supplier literature available for every chemical (and not just the literature
from your supplier) that you are using.After you have (at least) read all of the technical data sheets, it should be a little easier to
fix your formula, For example, in your formula, one of the ingredients that
provides thickening is Glucamate VLT. Here’s the experimentation part - you
need to make a series of batches that use increasing amounts of Glucamate VLT
until you have reached a viscosity you are comfortable with. Then you need to
duplicate this experiment with any other thickeners you’re using. Then, you
need to see if any of the thickeners are synergistic with each other. By this
point, you should be fairly comfortable with using the chemicals that thicken
your batch, and you will be able to answer your own question. -
I find it difficult to comprehend how deionized water could have less organic residue than distilled water - it just doesn’t make sense.
It would be an acceptable argument to say that the extra cost of distilled water is not worth the increase in purity of the water, and that properly filtered deionized water provides everything needed for cosmetic manufacturing.It might also make sense to say that commercially available distilled water has insufficient quality control, and might allow some organic residue through. But to paint all distilled water with the same brush is disturbing from a chemistry point of view, since I know that it is possible to distill water to the point that no contamination is even faintly detectable.