[lmosca]

Pointless, IMO.

There is enough evidence that CHG is inactivated by carbomers, which isn’t a surprise, considering that it is a bis(biguanidinium). 

Here is the first link that comes up, https://www.ajicjournal.org/article/S0196-6553(09)00075-3/fulltext

[lmosca]

You are adding an electrolyte to carbopol.

That what’s happening.

As a matter of fact, you are adding an electrolyte that has an immense affinity for carboxylate ions (like those in carbomers).

[lmosca]

What solvents are you using?

makingcosmetics.com sells polyamide-3.

[lmosca]

@ngarayeva001 and @EVchem, I remember seeing that video and asked myself: “Wow! A month in that vat?” 

I kept thinking that it could be something like glycerin (but it would be more viscous), or propanediol / glycol. Or something along these lines. If proportions between solids and diols were right, you could have a self preserved mixture, while at the same time extracting water from the watermelon. 

At least it would explain why some of the pieces where discolored to a pinkish-yellow and becoming translucent.

They also claim their products to be “silicone free” but they use simethicone (according to their LOIs). 

[lmosca]

It’s a time-dependent effect. Camphor cooling sensation fades in few minutes and is replaced by a warming effect. 
If cooling is required, I would stick to menthol or menthyl lactate only, just to be sure.

[lmosca]

Camphor activates heat receptors, not cold receptors.

Japanese peppermint oil is 60-70 % menthol. To the point that it’s solid in cold weather and you have to heat it up to weigh it. That will be a viable option if you are interested in putting a plant name on the LOI. 

[lmosca]

I wouldn’t in general. If you decide to go ahead with water:

Phenoxyethanol and parabens, hands down, will be the best preservatives.
Combined together, you can buy them as Phenonip. 
Perhaps chloroxylenol, if you have access to it?

I would definitely avoid formaldehyde donors, as I fear they might be decomposed by the clay. 

I would sanitize everything that might, even remotely, come in contact with the mixture using bleach or hydrogen peroxide, or sanitizers like starsan. Packaging in airtight containers of the smallest size (single use sealed packets will be the best, in this case). 

On top on that I will preserve myself with the best product liability insurance I could afford. 

I’d go overboard and say that if it was possible, I would buy a pasteurization plant, or a gamma-irradiation setup (but those run for $$$millions), and definitely the 60-Co irradiation will have additional administrative burden. 
But I am being excessively cautious.

[lmosca]

Hi @mudbug
That is great, and automatically solve many of the potential issues.

Roasting will take care of calcinating away eventual organic matter, and with it potential bugs. I will still suggest to roast the clay separately before production batches. A roasting oven at 180 C for 20 minutes will do the job at destroying all spores that might have deposited in transit.

Get rid of the water, you do not want to make a wet product. With clay the safest bet (and the other potential microbial food you are adding) is to make anhydrous products that the customers can hydrate however they want. 

I am also concerned that none of the other ingredients will do much. Clays are extremely adsorbent materials. In your formula, retinol, B3 and CoQ10 will be irreversibly adsorbed on the surface. The leaching of those will be basically neglectable. Same thing for the hyaluronic acid. Even more so for CBD.

Even if they could work, they will not be effective as the mask would be a rinse off product, and after 10 minutes would go flushing down the drain. They would only increase your production costs, and give no benefit whatsoever.

If you want to keep some vegetable extracts keep the cheapest you can find, add it as 0.5% as a marketing claim ingredient. And CBD if you want to enter this niche market, but do not expect any benefit.

Aside from that, I concord fully with @Belassi about the cost of a small-batch mask. It may sell a farmers markets or a small town brick and mortar store, but your sales would be incredibly low. People will still go buy packets of masks at Walmart for 99 cents.

[lmosca]

@mhart123, aside from raw material specifications and manufacturing, that have been already pointed out, could it be a problem with your analytical protocol, including sample preparation?

[lmosca]

@EVchem, I am big Alien dork, and I try to slip that in from time to time. 
Aside from that, if properly diluted, the extract can be used as a chemical exfoliant! 😉

[lmosca]

My main concerns are the following:

1) Is this a backyard operation? Are you digging up your own clay?

2) Has the clay been tested? Most heavy metal contamination in cosmetics (lead, chromium, arsenic, cobalt, nickel, mercury, cadmium) comes from mineral pigments and clay. Did you have a laboratory test those clay?

3) Do you have a microscopic analysis to confirm the absence of >5 micron fibers? (aka asbestos-like fibers)

4) How are you processing the clay? Washing, removal of organic matter, removal of coarse material, drying, roasting, sanitation?

That is all, and I haven’t gone past the first two items.
After that we may discuss items 32 through 12 (and the missing 13th).

[lmosca]

@DLR94, for oils, it is quite simple. To see what oils you want to replace, just look up the “Fatty acid profile of XXX oil”. Most commercially important oils will have their average fatty acid profile listed somewhere.

You can then compare the relative percentages of fatty acids to decide what oil to replace and with with what. Do not pay too much attention to the fatty acids that come at % lower than 1%, you will not see any difference. 

What you must be sure of is the “variety of oil”. While all oils have variations in composition depending on the cultivated varietal, climate where the source is grown, and even the harvesting season, those are usually small-ish variation.
However, some oils (sunflower, safflower, canola) have different breeds that are cultivated ultimately for oil production, for example, you can find high-, mid- and low-oleic versions of sunflower and safflower oils, and canola oil is a low erucic-acid version of colza or rapeseed oil. Always check what version you have before looking up the content. These varieties have been developed for increased shelf-life (high-oleic), and reduced toxicity to humans (low-erucic).

For other ingredients, well, the matter seems more complicated, but it is not as much. Group your ingredients by function. You will have:
- Emollients (all oils, esters, “thin” waxes and butters, silicones, and many more)
- Occlusives (waxes, paraffins, silicones, some heavy oils and butters)
- Humectants (glycerin, glycols, sodium lactate, polyols, panthenol, NaPCA, etc…)
- Film formers (proteins, peptides, aloe, hyaluronic acid, polymers, most of these also work as humectants)
- Conditioners (those are a mixed category, you can have positively charged molecules, like CTAC, BTMS, polymers like amodimethicone, polyquats), but some non-charged ingredients are also conditioners, like those that form polymer films (silicones mainly).

Of all these ingredients, the most basic formula will contain only one of those, for example, for function alone, it is pointless to have glycerin, propanediol, and sodium lactate or sodium PCA together, they all do the same stuff, keep water on the surface of the skin (humectant). You can replace, mix, and substitute them because you want to change how a formula performs, glycerine is sticky and draggy, so replacing it or subbing some of it with sodium lactate and propanediol will reduce the stickiness of the formula. 
Waxes, paraffins and silicones can all behave as occlusives, but waxes are sticky and draggy, paraffins are greasy, and silicones are usually not. That’s why you have a lot to play with, depending on the formula you want to achieve. But roughly the same ultimate goal will be achieved by using either one of those alone!

Now, some ingredients cannot be replaced by others, in some situations. 
You will not use sodium lactate in place of glycerin in a formula that is sensitive to electrolytes, or you will not use waxes, butters and solids fats in something that needs to be thin and liquid.

Or, you have the necessary ingredients:
- Emulsifiers and co-emulsifiers
- Surfactants
- Preservatives
- Water (for aqueous based, of course).

Those are the ingredients that, when replaced with others in the same category, will give you a completely different final product, or require different formulation, or, in the worst case, make a catastrophic mess with your ingredients. 

Then there are the “fancy ingredients”.
- Actives that work (some vitamins like retin-xx, ascorbic acid, niacinamide, sunscreens, chemical exfoliants like AHA, BHA, etc… really, there are not many that work)
- “Actives” that don’t work (the majority, including virtually most plant extracts, save a few) - those are claim ingredients, you add them at 0.01%, or replace them with anything and you will still get the same effect - nothing. But you can put them on the label and everybody is going to flock and say how that “Internecivus raptus extract” is miraculous.

Of course, I am oversimplifying, but the kernel of the issue is there. 

Keep your formulas simple, test them out, and refine them by:
1) replacing one ingredient at a time
2) adding one ingredient at a time.

[lmosca]

Pointless! 

EGF is a 6 kDa protein. It will never cross the epidermis to reach the basal proliferative layer. 

Scammers, probably; or a very careful marketing campaign to avoid making drug claims (which means that it doesn’t work, because if it would, then it will be a drug).

Even what some snake oil purveyors say, that it initiates a cascade of signaling within the epidermis, is just a smoke screen.
Signalling and protein synthesis is required in the corneocytes to produce that cascade before you reach the keratinocytes.

Small problem… the corneocytes have lost all their genetic information and cellular machinery that allows a cell to produce protein, enzymes, and initiate metabolic processes, so that can’t happen.

[lmosca]

Hi @DLR94, 15% of glyceryl-4 oleate seems reasonable. As this will be the majority of your cost, you may eventually elect to reduce it.
Another emulsifier that will work (and is liquid, so it will dissolve well in your mixture) is sorbitan oleate (or laurate, or stearate, but those are solids).

Safflower and sunflower oils are virtually almost identical. Unless you already use both you can only use one of them in your formula. 

What you should try to do next is starting with your basic formula (in small amount, 100 g or even less!) and try it out. From there you can adjust the proportion of medium viscosity oils (sunflower, safflower), low viscosity (CCT), so that it gives the required solvency for greasy make-up and spreadability.

You don’t want something that drags, but something light and lubricious. If you want something more viscous, however, you can add castor oil.
The right viscosity will also play a big role since you want to pump these products, you don’t want high-velocity oils shooting out of the pump!

Next phase, you can play with the emulsifier, by increasing or reducing the percentage until you achieve a good rinsing ability.

Additionally, you can move toward higher HLB values (you can do so by changing emulsifier, or by mixing a low HLB one with a medium-HLB one, like polysorbate-80 or -60). Those will definitely leave a more clean, less unctuous feeling after the first cleansing, but of course you will need more materials and test-runs.

[lmosca]

@EVchem, sure! EDTA is the gold standard of chelators. Not only is the most easily accessible chelator out there, but it’s behavior has been well characterized over almost a century. 

You can find virtually any kind of speciation diagram as a function of pH for any couple H4EDTA + M+ to form the respective complex.

The chemistry of it is very simple, because all complexes of EDTA have a 1:1 stoichiometry with a metal ion. 

Pyrophosphate (PP) behaves in the same way as EDTA, as it exists in its tetra-anionic through “acid” form (pyrophosphoric acid). The pKa of EDTA and PP are not that much different when we consider the tri-anion and di-anion states.
The main problem is that at pH=6 EDTA has still a massive driving force to form complexes with ions, while pyrophosphate’s ability to complex diminishes steeply by decreasing the pH.

At pH= 10, PP has a logK for Calcium of 4.6, while EDTA has a logK of 11.
The fact that PP can form complexes with different stoichiometries makes it more difficult to model.
Yet another difficulty is given by the solubility of some complexes of PP, some are fairly insoluble (copper, nickel, barium) while some phosphates (calcium, iron) are insoluble and will drive the hydrolysis of PP to P. 

All complexes of EDTA are soluble in water, so there is no selective precipitation of the ligand.
Another factor to consider, is that to achieve the same “sequestration” effect, you will need to use PP at much higher levels than you would use EDTA. At that point you will start destabilizing emulsions, shifting the pH toward alkaline, or completely throwing off the rheology of the product due to the large amount of electrolyte introduced. 

Nevertheless, it is still more convenient and cheaper to use Na2PP or Na4PP in alkaline detergents, because it is dirt cheap, non hygroscopic, and can be compounded as a dry powder. By keeping the mixture alkaline (laundry detergents, industrial cleaners, etc…) you work in the pH region of maximum efficacy for PP. 

EDTA has its own problems, mind. It is not “natural” whatever the term means and it’s quite persistent in the environment; however, PP is responsible for eutrophication when used massively. I didn’t see much on it’s chelating properties as a preservative booster. I think that the formation constants we see in the near-neutral pH zone are not enough to sequester essential ions from microorganisms and inhibit their cellular processes like EDTA does. 

[lmosca]

@DLR94
Scrap all the fancy oils like jojoba and hemp. You want to make a cleanser / make up remover, so most of the things you put in the cleanser will get absorbed onto a cloth / cotton disc / or down the drain. 
Even more, as you follow your first cleanse with an aqueous surfactant cleanser, it doesn’t make any sense to stuff your first cleanser with expensive or fancy oils. 

Now, if you want to add them to make your label fancy (as we were talking before) just add jojoba or other fancy oils below 0.5%. You will still put them on the ingredient list, and everyone will rejoice.

Steer clear from things like hemp seed oil, grapeseed oil, and similar, because they have an extremely short shelf life, even at very low percentages, they will make your product go rancid quite fast. 

You also want a thin consistency, to help spreadability and absorbency onto cleaning pads or cloths. For this reason you may want to replace most of the oils with a light, low viscosity oil, for example fractionated coconut oil, or capric/caprylic triglycerides (aka MCT). For the rest, stick with cheap and fluid oils, for example sunflower, safflower, prunus oils like almond, apricot kernel etc,,, Keep olive oil for salads. 
Many claim that castor oil is good in oil cleansers. I personally do not see any evidence and I did not find any study that confirms that. Plus it’s viscous as hell. 

The last improvement you could do is adding a low HLB emulsifier to your oils, anything in the range 3-8 will do. In most cases, you will get a clear solution of the emulsifier into your oil, but when you rinse out with water, you will emulsify them and you will get a better lift of product and make-up from the face upon rinsing. 

[lmosca]

tetrasodium pyrophosphate acts as a chelator stable toward oxidation.
Pyrophosphate likes to complex things like zinc, chromium, manganese, and iron ions, the latter are the most problematic for the stability of hydrogen peroxide, and virtually ubiquitous. They also bring the pH up a little bit, which is perfect to increase the lifetime of H2O2. As the pH lowers, H2O2 becomes a more powerful oxidant, and thus it can react with more things.

[lmosca]

@DLR94 that is not the point of it. 

If you convince yourself (and others) that it is a valid point, than it is a valid point. That is how marketing works, and why there will always be a certain ingrentient “hype”, or a new chemical will be demonized (think about sulfates, parabens). The trick part is trying to convince others. 

However, thinking home-made, small-batch cosmetics as being green would be a lie.

What you need to ask yourself, and your brand is: 
- what are my goals?
- what market am I targeting? And on which scale?
- what are the benefits of my product(s) in respect to the rest?
- what are the weaknesses in my product(s) and where should I invest to improve them?
- how novel is my product? 
- does my product innovate the market? Is it new, uses new ingredients, makes new claims, new packaging, new technology, new marketing strategy etc…?
- how honest do I want to be with the customers?

If you can answer all these in an articulated, fact-and-science backed way then there “might” be a point in making your product, if not, you’ll have to go back to the drawing board. 

These answers will constitute the nucleus of your business plan. Again, that will be only for yourself. You still have to convince the public to buy your product, so you might have to redesign your plans again and again, until people buy in.

From there, you go technical and create a business plan, contact experts, do more product research and development, look for capital, investors and so on. 

Remember, creating a product is not making a product that YOU want, but the  product that YOUR CUSTOMERS ABSOLUTELY WANT.
i.e., if there is no demand for the formula you’ve developed, you will not sell it.

On the other had, you can go around by creating a demand for a product through marketing, but you’ll never be able to compete with multinational companies (unless you have $Bn to spare for market research, advertisement, and lobbying).

[lmosca]

@Pharma ^ this is gold! ^

It is risible to want to start formulating on a small scale with the goal to save the environment, for one reason or the other. There is certain point of the philosophy “local, small scale, hand-made, green, whatever” blurb that just breaks and doesn’t hold together. 

The practical problems are, in my opinion, the most important. The small-scale factor for example. It takes a lot more energy, per mass unit of finished product to heat, cool, or stir a smaller batch than a larger one, mainly because of energy dissipation, and the fact that large scale manufacturers have vessels that have been the product of over a century of technological improvement to guarantee the least possible loss of energy. The usual (of which I am one) kitchen chemist with a beaker and a double boiler and a stick blender is perhaps the least energy efficient (aside from an open pit coal fire). And there are many more. It is a lot greener to move 15 tonnes of anything in a truck from a port to a factory than shipping 15000 x 1 kg packages through the post service or a fast courier across the country. On top of that, let’s consider that 1 kg of that repackaged product is probably half-way through its shelf life already, and that you will use perhaps 30% of it before throwing it away. And if you managed to use it all, you probably had many failures, and your product will spoil faster, because it’s an old ingredient.

On the other hand, hand-made should be a synonym of absolute craftsmanship, unsurpassed quality, and uniqueness. Oftentimes it is a sub-par product, with mediocre or comparable quality to a mass-produced item. So something is missing there.
And what is missing there is the craftsmanship. You can’t compare yourself with a company with the best possible technological equipment, best and freshest ingredients, and hundreds of years of combined expertise (given by the formulator chemists employed, and the existing scientific literature). 

But I am ranting here. The morale is, if you think you are doing small-scale, hand-made, green, safe-for-the-environment cosmetic products, you are dead wrong. You’ll be greener if you had to drive 50 miles to buy a cleanser packaged in a non-recyclable container, wrapped in styrofoam, using a diesel car from the 1970.

On a side note, oils, for example, dramatically increase the oxygen demand of waste treatment. If that oxygen demand is not met, the septic flora dies off because of the anoxic conditions, and if that happens (and the septic treatment plant cannot cope with the “fat matter”) the efflux might end up in rivers, lakes, and seas, where it deprives flora and fauna living there of oxygen. 

[lmosca]

@Dtdang, yes, it has a lower irritancy potential than menthol alone. The odor is weaker that pure menthol as well, and so it does not overpower you like someone just slapped you with a bag of life-savers. 

As it does not have the same “power” of menthol, you do not experience the “mint-tingly” sensation. There are pros and cons as using one or the other, on one side menthol is a powerhouse of scent, cooling, and irritancy, on the other side menthyl lactate is an ok cooling agent, poor in the scent department, and virtually non irritating at low usage rates.

Mind you, I have only used products containing menthyl lactate but not formulated with it.

[lmosca]

@Dtdang, the cooling effect of menthol (and other menthyl derivatives) is only marginally caused by evaporative cooling (the same effect as spraying alcohol on your skin and blowing air on it).

True, menthol is a solid with a very high vapor pressure, and it can be sublimed. But most if not all of its cooling effect is that it reversibly binds and activate the cold sensitive receptor on skin and mucosae (CMR1/TRPM8). The receptor generates a response in nerves that is equal to when you touch a cold or freezing surface.

In a sense, it does the opposite of capsaicin receptors, that give a sensation of heat, when no heat was actually applied to the area.

Menthol is also a poor analgesic, as it weakly activated kappa-opioid receptors, that’s why is used in anti-itching formulations, together with anti-histaminics and more powerful analgesics.

[lmosca]

@Sam0794, if you truly are new to formulating, you should probably leave chemical exfoliants for when you have some more experience. 
Granted, handling and formulating with fruit acid extract is not as worrisome as handling glycolic or lactic acids, but it can still be a difficult thing to do safely for a novice.

So before you start this endeavors, I would like to ask you the following:

- How are you measuring your ingredients? Do you have good quality scale/balances that allows you to measure “at least” fractions of grams (on one end), and “at least” hundreds of grams (on the other end)?

- What tools do you have to measure the pH of your final product, down to 0.1 units of pH?

- What other ingredients are you planning to use? The most basic AHA liquid could contain only water, AHA, pH adjuster, preservative. From there you can add other ingredients, humectants, emollients, rheology modifiers, claim (or fancy label) ingredients that don’t do much; the AHAs will do all the hard work, but you added 0.01% of Internecivus raptus extract, so now you can make the unsubstantiated claim that it was the extract that did its job).
However, not all ingredients will be ultimately compatible or stable for long at your target pH. 

It doesn’t take much to transform a lightly exfoliating overnight formula to a low-strength chemical peel. 

[lmosca]

Fenton chemistry may also be prevalent if using poorly purified ingredients (extracts, natural oils, water with higher-than-normal ionic content, or that has been stored in metal containers).

If you have even a trace amount of metal ions (particularly the ferric or ferrous ions), that’s where you generate hydroxyl radicals, HO•. 
Those can react virtually with anything organic, and can even hydroxylate inorganic surfaces as well. 

Going OT. For those interested in gruesome chemistry details, search online for “Piranha solution accidents”. It’s a mixture of concentrated sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. The stuff violently incinerates anything organic, no matter if small or big, all thanks to the hydroxyl radicals. 

[lmosca]

Sepimax Zen works well for me. I make a AHA gel with a pH of 4 and it is very stable. You wouldn’t notice a difference in viscosity. I use 2%, but I have a small oil phase in it as well. 

[lmosca]

@David08848 

KOH 38 Be corresponds to 36% KOH
NaOH 38 Be corresponds to 32% NaOH

I don’t know where you came up with 10% in your last calculation.

If you are using formula 1 you need:
36 kg of KOH solution (38 Be = 36%), that is 12.96 kg KOH (solid) dissolved in 23.04 kg H2O.
Obtained from (kg of KOH) = 36 (kg of solution) x 0.36 (percent concentration or 36/100)
Water is obtained by difference.

and

19 kg of NaOH solution (38 Be = 32%), that is 6.08 kg NaOH (solid) dissolved in 12.92 kg H2O.
Obtained from (kg of NaOH) = 19 (kg of solution) x 0.32 (percent concentration or 32/100).