[Herbnerd]

Sheep placenta is a common ingredient used in cosmetic products from New Zealand. The Chinese love that stuff.

Though I did hear it was a popular product amongst African Americans, until the residual hormones present in placenta started interrupting their cycles.

Sheep placenta is a by-product of the slaughterhouse - along with stabilised amniotic fluid (Yes, this is real too) and sometimes the whole uterus along with placenta and lamb is used to produce the “extract”.

One job I had, and sadly this is true, was to develop a range of placenta beverages for the Asian market. You cannot begin to imagine how disgusting the smell was. People who worked with me at the time certainly have never forgotten.

[Herbnerd]

You would probably need to buy a glass muller for an artists supply shop and grind the pigments yourself in a liquid base. Artists tend to use oils, IPA may evaporate too quickly to do this effectively. 

So, may be better to buy pre-dispersed pigments.

[Herbnerd]

Epsom salts are insoluble in oils and waxes. You won’t be able to do it.

Only possible way would be to dissolve the epsom salts into water first - and then emulsify into the waxes. But you are looking at around 20-25% epsom salts in the water phase.

[Herbnerd]

Simplest thing would be to dissolve the menthol crystals into the Eucalyptus and Orange oils first, once dissolved, you can mix into the fractionated coconut oil (I assume you are referring to MCT/Capric-caprylic acid?)

Highly saturated oils tend not to go rancid; however, you could add some vitamin E or rosmarinic acid to it.

[Herbnerd]

Currently formulating toothpaste for an international brand. Feel free to drop me a line with your brief.

[Herbnerd]

Capric/Caprylic acid triglycerides (often sold as medium chain triglycerides) are perfectly edible. 

You find this is popular amongst keto devotees for weight-loss

[Herbnerd]

@MapX

For work, I have a kitchenaid mixer to do all my development work. I do have access vintage vacuum mixer to do the de-aeration, and I fill the toothpaste tubes with a chef’s piping bag and cream nozzle; and seal the tubes with a hair straightener!

A company with $10 billion of sales can’t stump up $15K on some basic lab equipment!

It can be done on a budget if you need to!

[Herbnerd]

@ketchito Thank you. This is what I needed to hear. Greatly appreciated.

[Herbnerd]

I’m working on this at the moment, including the Sorbosil TC15, though I am swapping (owing to work wanting me to reduce all our single ingredient suppliers) to Evonik Zeodent 168 as the viscosity forming part and Zeodent 115 as the abrasive.
On their own, the TC145 or Zeodent 168 isn’t enough to form a gel. I have used Sodium CMC (Cekol 2000) at 0.5% to further increase the gel.

I’ve not tried with carbopol - you need to neutralise this to get the full gelling effect, and not sure how this would do at more alkali pH. I have tried dispersing this in glycerol previously, when you add the water it thickens up nicely.

Translucency is the bit I am struggling with. You need to match the refractive index of the liquid (Sorbitol, glycerol, water) with the refractive index of the various silicon dioxides - and you need to mix in a vacuum to de-aerate otherwise it is just as white as if you has used calcium carbonate.

[Herbnerd]

I suspect you are dropping the hyaluronic acid below the isoelectric point and precipitating the proteins.

For general stability, you ideally need a pH of between 3.6-4.2

[Herbnerd]

Personally I do everything in Excell. I set up a database tab with all the ingredients and parameters I need (pack size, INCI, trade name, costs etc) and use a formulation template to do the formulation and costing using index-match-match.

[Herbnerd]

Yep, as stated by others, it is a combination of low water activity and low pH. T

The combination of sugar and glycerol, lowers the water activity.

[Herbnerd]

ngarayeva001 said:

@Agate, I agree censoring is evil. This situation is just frustrating. How many people would bother reading WHO recommendations? Not many I guess, but much more would use ready formula. People enjoy cooking and there are much more chances that someone repeats it when it’s written in a format “1 cup of alcohol, 2 cups of aloe etc”. And some of them would think, “I don’t have alcohol, I will replace it with vodka, it has alcohol too”. So even if the DIY formula measured in cups was written correctly and has 60% v/v of alcohol, it doesn’t mean that people will reproduce it right.

Honestly, I find the best approach if I see friends posting such stuff is to advise them that they need minimum 60-70% alcohol in the finished product - using vodka at say 40% means there is only 24% ethanol - barely enough to keep the product self preserving.

[Herbnerd]

@alchemist01

Lobelia inflata because of its toxicity  (lobeline and isolobeline content) is used at very low doses and it is more than likely that this is a homoeopathic tincture.

As for definitions of 1X (also referred to as a 1D in some countries) best to refer to a homoeopathic materia medica - the X (or D) refers to a 1:10 dilution. That is 1 part herb to 9 parts solvent (ethanol, water etc)

[Herbnerd]

Perry said:

This seems like it is a reference to food extracts. See this description of vanilla extract. 
http://www.amadeusvanillabeans.com/extracts/single-fold-vanilla.php

For vanilla extract
1X = 3.45% vanilla beans, 96.55% alcohol
2X = 6.9% vanilla bans, 93.1% alcohol

True - but vanilla is the only herb I have come across listed in this manner. Also, vanilla can be listed as 1-fold, 3 fold extract too.

[Herbnerd]

Normally a 1X refers to a homoeopathic extract - 1 part herb to 90 parts water and succussed 200 times (a sort of mix of shaking and banging the extraction vessel onto a hard surface.

However, you could have a 1:10 extract - which is little more than a weak plant extract, usually reserved for toxic plants used in herbal medicine. That said, it could also be used to produce plant extracts for cosmetic purposes for the purposes of a claim. Herbal extracts are never stated as 1X but 1:10. This means 1 part herb to 9 parts solvent

Most herbal extracts are concentrated powdered extracts as 5:1 - one part extract is equivalent to 5 parts dry herb.

[Herbnerd]

Never formulate with raw honey - it makes it difficult to export to some countries.

Pasteurised honey is fine. I have done work with honey powder - from 100% Freeze dried (never use this - it is as deliquescent as hell), 70% spray dried on maltodextrin (hygroscopic and turns sticky), 50% spraydried on cyclodextrin (was fine to work with - but expensive)

If you are working on a cream, better dissolve your honey into your aqueous phase, but use pasteurised honey to prevent micro issues too.

[Herbnerd]

Pharma said:

 Greta Thunberg must be smiling too…

Hardly - it looks like she has a permanent scowl.

[Herbnerd]

Bill_Toge said:

a vacuum pump can only do so much; the best way to avoid bubbles is to avoid introducing air into the product in the first place (prevention being better than cure)

So true - but it seems my vacuum mixer is whipping more air into the product than I started with. 

[Herbnerd]

Hong Kong is officially part of China, but is an SAR and has its own laws and governance.  For China (Mainland) we had to comply with the GB regulations. HK was very different and a lot more relaxed is its regulatory framework.

[Herbnerd]

We are formulating and reformulating all of our products to COSMOS Natural standards. The only reason is we sell our products in Australia, and Australia’s definition of what is and what is not natural is extremely restrictive. They consider orange oil that has been mechanically pressed to be natural, but a steam distilled essential oil is not.

The sole reason we took this route is that we are not claiming natural, but we are using someone else’s trademark and audit process to say we meet their standards - In essence, it is a low risk claim that actually isn’t a claim.

As many have pointed out to me, if you want to claim natural you can just make up your own definitions. If you want to claim organic - you must meet the organic definitions and certifications of that particular body - Soil Association in UK, NOP in USA etc.

[Herbnerd]

Regarding “expired” ingredients. We use to regard some ingredients as expired and would dispose of at that date, for others, such as vitamins and minerals we used the date as a re-test date to the assay against the C of A. And this does seem to be accepted pharmaceutical practice for some materials

We used to re-test micro, loss on drying and assay of the vitamin concerned to ensure it either complied with the manufacturer’s C of A or didn’t deviate far from it (in which could be considered analyst error during testing).

However, for 25 g it is probably not worth paying a couple of hundred dollars to do all this. For something that is barely 6 months past expiry, and a product of this nature, and the fact you are likely to be using it in a trial product - I would suspect you can safely use it.

I would be more concerned if you were making a 3 tonne batch and had a couple of hundred kilos going into it - then I would test the hell out of everything and ask QA to extend the retest date.

[Herbnerd]

Depends on many thing.

Perfume ingredients can be:

• Natural (from fully natural sources) or,
• Artificial from synthetic analogues of natural compounds (used to be called “Nature Identical” but this is deemed misleading now.
• Synthetic  - from the laboratory only.

Geraniol can be sourced from Rose Geranium (Pelargonium graveolans) and the geraniol can be fractionated from the steam distilled geranium oil.
Geraniol can also be synthetically manufactured.

It can be the same for Citronellal (natural from lemon grass, or synthetic). Both can be combined with other natural perfume ingredients to make either a natural rose oil or a synthetic rose oil (depending on the source of the perfume chemicals). The manufactured stuff is cheap - but both the natural and synthetc perfumes can also be referred to as rose oil. 

Rose absolute can be produced from rose petals and is very expensive. I’m not sure enfleurage is still used, but CO2 can be effective at extraction.

There are a number of truly synthetic flavour and perfume ingredients, such as ethyl vanillin, which was one of the first synthetic perfume chemicals.

[Herbnerd]

It should be one of those discussions you have with a CM before you impart any information. Some labs will have different fees depending on whether they own the IP or whether you retain ownership regardless of the work they have done - and in which case, they may charge you a development fee.

[Herbnerd]

Yep - still a thing. I am currently reformulating a range of toothpaste to “remove the nasties” (that was the brief - and I had to get the marketing team to define the nasties they want removed.

I guess their thinking is that green tea saponins or olive oil glutamate looks better on the label to the natural crowd than Sodium Lauryl Sulphate.