Perry44
Forum Replies Created
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To get closer to a “store-bought” product, you first have to get rid of the ingredients that are either doing nothing or actively making your product worse. Remover (or reduce to <1%) the following….
Glycerin, Bamboo Liquid Extract, Date Palm Liquid Extract, Honeyquat, Panthenol Powder, Vegekeratin Hydrolyzed Protein.
Make that formula first and then see how your needs to be improved. With the exception of Glycerin, the ingredients I listed above are what we call “claims” ingredients. They are just put in formulas (especially shampoos) to give the marketing people something to talk about. They don’t actually work to do anything in the formula.
You don’t include Glycerin because it depresses foam and provides no real benefit to a shampoo.
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Ha!
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They might just think they get a better feel or wet comb or something. I personally don’t think it is necessary.
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Well one thing is that Carbomer doesn’t work very well with electrolytes like sodium benzoate. Also, you should neutralize Carbomer at the end, not at the start.
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I don’t think making a shampoo at pH 10 or 11 is a good idea.
There is no benefit to it and you might harm someone who uses it.
Keep the pH at around 5.0 and also add some preservative! -
They didn’t give you an ingredient list? It seems pretty pointless without it.
I guess they want you to add some HPMC (cellulose polymer). That could help with viscosity, stability & foam.
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If someone is trying to sell you something, you should begin with the assumption that they are not telling you the whole truth. This isn’t to say they are lying to you but all facts are dressed up to tell the best story. And sometimes, they are lying.
But to your question more specifically.
This is a slightly controversial opinion, but I do not believe any actives that are not proven drug actives are effective at doing anything noticeable for a consumer’s skin. The one exception are Alpha Hydroxy Acids which pretty clearly cause a reaction on skin.
But things like Peptides, vitamins, extracts, flavonoids, retinoids, niacinamide, or whatever anti aging ingredient is being sold, they just don’t have consumer perceptible effects. Sure, there may be some lab data but when these things get put into moisturizing formulas, any effect they might have had is overshadowed by the obvious effects of just using a moisturizer.
And honestly, the research that is published even in peer reviewed literature is mostly terrible. They rig the studies to ensure they show some significant effect. They never answer the questions that people really want to know. They answer questions that will best help them sell their ingredients.
I’ve participated in running these studies. You don’t pay good money for research just to publish negative results. That means only positive results are published & anything negative is just not submitted.
Now, I don’t wish to come off sounding so cynical as I do believe there certainly is potential for active ingredients in skin care. I just don’t think the stuff out there right now provides consumer noticeable effects for the vast majority of consumers. Good moisturizers is about all we’ve got.
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If you put an ingredient in your formula on purpose for some specific reason you should list it. There is no lower limit where if you are below it you don’t have to list the ingredient. That’s made up.
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When formulating, it’s always advisable to start out with as few ingredients as you can. If you’re looking for hold the key ingredient will be PVP. I’d start with 4% and look to reduce it if the hold is too stiff.
I don’t see a lot of reason to have both Glycerin and Propanediol. I’d just use the Propanediol.
I don’t like having Citric Acid in a Carbomer system as it can break your viscosity. You also likely don’t need it although you may to reduce the pH.
I’d start simple. Water, PVP, Cetearyl alcohol, Carbomer, Triethanolamine, preservative and see what you get. Then add the Propanediol, hydrolyzed protein, oil if you want.
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Potassium olivate is natural?
What plant produces potassium olivate? Don’t you have to chemically react olive oil in a lab to produce potassium olivate?
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You’re arguing something different than my point. My point is that saponification is not more natural than the process used to make SLES. In your way of looking at it, I would agree there are less steps, but that doesn’t make it more “natural”. It is still a man-made process that requires synthetic chemistry that isn’t produced in nature. They are both synthetic compounds.
I also disagree with your assessment of the safety of the ingredient and will defer to toxicologist opinions.
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There are lots of people who ride around in cars without seatbelts and never get hurt. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
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It’s not that the corporation necessarily imposes their ethos on the bought company, usually what happens is that the small company wasn’t following all the appropriate regulations & rules of the industry so formulas, claims and packaging usually have to be updated. Then companies look to reduce costs by getting economy of scale so formulas are often optimized.
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No.
Sensitive skin is a term that is not really well defined. And targeting babies is especially problematic when trying to make consumer-noticeable differences. Because babies can’t really tell you if something is working better or not. You’re left with parental observation which is just not reliable for subtle changes.
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When I was in college, we did an exercise where we were given a substance and some clues about what it possibly could be. Then through using various chemical reactions and techniques we could identify what substance it might be. That is the kind of thing you need done. That would be an Analytical Chemist. Ideally, someone who also has a background in cosmetic science. Unfortunately, that’s a rare combination of skills. And this is also a very difficult (if even possible) problem.
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Ah, well if that’s the project. I personally don’t think it is really possible. Our ability to identify individual molecules in formulations is rather limited.
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I actually have a chapter in the Harry’s book & the Draelos books are good sources. But these books, and other industry standard books, tend to just report on research that gets published. It’s helpful to learn about what is out there and how things may theoretically work. However, these books and the journals that publish the research they are based on, suffer from a positivity bias. They need something new to publish. They can’t publish negative studies that tell people what I believe is generally true: nothing that isn’t a drug active provides any consumer noticeable effect better than a good moisturizer.
The industry is filled with motivated research. It’s not like basic research where scientists are trying to find out what is true. Rather it is research designed to demonstrate what might be true. And that is because most of it is funded by companies that financially benefit from finding good marketing stories to help sell their products.
But if you’re looking to learn the basics of what is believed in the industry and by consumers, those books are good places to start.
I’ll add that AI isn’t going to help much with this problem either. It’s been trained on weak research & just parrots back those results.
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Correct, it’s all about the claims (for the most part). Petrolatum is also an OTC skin protectant active but it’s used in cosmetic products all the time.
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For duplicating products, I don’t think the specific ingredients matter very much. If you give a good cosmetic chemist a sample of a product and tell them what you want the product to do, they should be able to create something that duplicates the effect. It’s easier to do if you have the ingredient list, but creams, lotions, solutions…consumers are not good at noticing difference between two similar formulas.
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Sounds reasonable. Although, I’m not sure if the preservative will interfere with the Carbomer thickening.
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This discussion demonstrates very clearly the difference between a marketing mindset & a scientific mindset.
To be a successful scientist you spend your time and effort trying to discover what is true. You always must remain open to new data which can make you change your mind. For a scientist no conclusion is 100% definitive. You care about unveiling what is true.
To be a successful marketer you spend your time finding evidence that supports what you believe. Any evidence to the contrary is ignored, dismissed or minimized. You make statements that are definite and leave no room for changing your positions. You are not driven by truth but rather by ideology and for many, by storytelling that will motivate consumers to buy what you’re selling.
Unfortunately, a marketing mindset is much more monetarily successful in our industry. I completely understand how even people with science backgrounds can embrace the marketing mindset.
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There are limits. The two posts prompted a worthwhile discussion so I didn’t take them down. He is also a longtime contributor to the forum & I appreciate his different perspective. But yes too much self promotion without prompting discussion will get removed.
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We just disagree. From my perspective the synthetic detergent you use is not any more natural than Sodium Lauryl Sulfate which is derived from coconut oil. If you were truly natural you would only use saponins as your detergent. I think it’s disingenuous to call your products natural when they only exist due to human induced chemical synthesis.
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No, you couldn’t really get much out of using a mass spec or chromatography. There are just too many different chemicals in a cosmetic product. It’s not like an organic chemistry lab where you would be just looking at a simple solution for specific Hydrocarbon bonds and peaks and things. There could be hundreds of different chemicals in a cosmetic.
For example, when an ingredient is listed as Sodium Lauryl Sulfate, it’s not just SLS. See this blog post on the subject. https://chemistscorner.com/what-is-in-a-cosmetic-ingredient/
Basically, every ingredient used in a cosmetic is a mixture of chemicals, not just a single chemical. So things like mass spec and chromatography are not very helpful in determining exactly what is in a formula.
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How is saponification any more natural than sulfation?