OldPerry
Forum Replies Created
-
There really aren’t any if you’re not willing to use parabens or phenoxyethanol or other chemically sounding preservatives like Methylisothiazolinone, DMDM Hydantoin or Iodopropynyl Butylcarbamate.
There is a reason industry uses parabens. It’s because they work, they aren’t irritating, they don’t destabilize emulsions and they don’t usually cause allergic reactions. If there was some simple replacement, industry would have switched to them long ago.
New preservatives that are out aren’t effective or cause irritation issues.
-
Cosmetics are not unregulated. It is illegal to sell unsafe cosmetics. You have to follow GMP and the FDA is empowered to inspect your facilities and check all your paperwork.
When the DSHEA act was passed in 1994, Congress essentially took away any power that the FDA had for regulating the supplement industry. Now, there is no good reason to have faith that the supplement industry is even selling you the ingredient you think you are buying. Unless you bring a lawsuit against them, they could sell you powdered sugar and call it betaine. There’s a lot of money to be made in the supplement industry since it’s pretty much unregulated. And people sell practically anything. https://www.inverse.com/science/diet-supplements-5-poisonous-ingredients
-
What do you want the Betaine to do in your formula?
Supplements are unregulated so you don’t really know what you are buying. -
Costs? It depends on what you get. I think you could probably get a working lab for $1000 and a much better working lab for $5000. I doubt you’d have to spend much more than that.
-
@zacchaeus - Betaine provides superior moisture over glycerin? What has convinced you of this? Do you have a link to some study?
In the industry, glycerin is the benchmark humectant that all others are compared to. In terms of effectiveness, I’ve not seen a more economical & efficient choice.
-
The lowest level is the level which you can prove will not harm people. There isn’t a number. There is a formulation & how it affects skin.
-
There isn’t a simple answer to this since it depends on
1. The ingredients in your formula
2. The price at which you can get the ingredients
3. How the ingredients affect your marketing position
I’d guess Vitamin E is better since there is a bigger supply so the price should be lower, but I don’t know the pricing you get. -
@letsalcido - These days, you don’t even need a product. You just need a description of the product benefits and maybe a cool video to demonstrate the prototype. You post it on Kickstarter and if you can raise enough money with your marketing, it would be a simple matter to hire a chemist to make your product (if it is something that is possible to create).
I think the biggest problem in the cosmetic industry is that there aren’t any new ideas. If you think of an idea for a product and you see that it isn’t already on the market, there are one of two reasons for this.
1. Someone already tried the idea and consumers didn’t buy it.
2. The technology doesn’t exist to make the idea work. -
I think you are using the wrong term. Rather than “Ink Name”, I think you mean INCI name. This refers to the official name of ingredients as listed in the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients compendium.
When you are creating a List of Ingredients (LOI) which goes on the back of your cosmetic product, you are required to list the INCI name of all your materials.
The Trade Name is a name that the raw material manufacturer gives to an ingredient they sell. They do this as a way to make their own products stand out and make it easier to market. You DO NOT use this name when putting together a list of ingredients. You may use this name when you are putting together a formula. In fact, it is probably better to use a trade name when putting a formula together so you know which supplier to use for making a formula.
I do not know what “Grade Name” means but I would guess that this is a alpha-numeric designation that the raw material supplier gives to different blends of a specific raw material. It is not really used in the cosmetic industry (as far as I know).
As an example. Consider a detergent like Sodium Lauryl Sulfate.
INCI name: Sodium Lauryl Sulfate
Trade Names: Stepanol LCP (Stepan) or Jeelate SLS-30 (Jeen)
Grade names: (Stepan) Stepanol LCP, Stepanol CFAS-70, Stepanol DXAS165P -
Nice! I see…the two red legos = two Oxygen atoms.
-
Stearyl Alcohol?
-
@charlotte - I know this paper. It looks like they conclude that Glycerin or Propylene glycol coat the hair and prevent it from drying by preventing water from escaping. This kinda defeats the purpose of protecting from heat damage since the heat is being applied specifically to dry hair. That’s probably why it hasn’t been recommended as a solution.
-
I’ll start by saying I do not specifically know. Suppliers give advice about their raw materials for a variety of reasons. But here is my guess.
1. They haven’t tested all of their powders for safety. Here is a list of all the fruit powders that the CIR has reviewed. Notice banana fruit powder isn’t there? So recommending a lower level reduces the chances of some safety issue. Since they don’t know the safety limit of all the fruit powders, they set some default level for all of them. Higher levels may (or may not) be safe.
2. The fruit powders are made of pretty much all the same ingredient. There is no specific standard for making a fruit powder. So, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the manufacturer starts with a standard base powder (made up of water soluble, innocuous ingredients and then they add some amount of fruit powder to differentiate the different products. Since the specifications on fruit powders are not very chemically specific, this would not be difficult to do. That % then become the known safety level for the base powder.
Using fruit powders over their recommended safety level is not a good idea. If you do that and one of your consumers has a reaction to the ingredient, you can’t go back to the supplier and blame them for that. You’re not using the ingredient as recommended.
Whether it is safe or not, who knows? It’s probably safe for some people (as you have experienced) but it may not be safe for other people. Allergic reactions to natural ingredients is not uncommon (maybe 5% of the population). If safety testing hasn’t been done, you should assume that it is not safe. You shouldn’t base product safety on what we might imagine is safe.
The reality is that it probably doesn’t matter at all how much fruit powder you use. It is unlikely to have any noticeable effect (except possibly a negative allergic reaction). These ingredients are generally claims ingredients put in at tiny levels so consumers have something to believe that makes the product special.
Hope that helps. 🙂
-
They could probably all be replaced with sunflower oil.
-
It’s all about the nitrosamines.
https://cosmeticsinfo.org/nitrosamines
Not at a level in cosmetics that people have to worry about, but fear mongering prompted the big players in the cosmetic industry to move away from the ingredients. -
Do a search on https://knowde.com
-
You might find this article helpful.
https://www.shopify.com/blog/name-generators-to-create-your-brandAnd the questions @EVchem asked are key ones to have answers for as you go about building your brand.
-
We used to get our hair swatches from here.
-
I wouldn’t have any faith that this would be a reliable preservative.
It’s new, so it is unproven. How did they prove that it is safe?Just because something has a patent doesn’t mean that it is safe and effective. It doesn’t take much to get a patent.
They claim that it is edible which means that some microbe will be able to eat it, so that it’s probably not going to be much of a preservative.
Just my view based on reading their press release.
-
I agree, microbial growth. There’s a reason the industry has used parabens and formaldehyde donors for decades. They work when other things don’t.
-
Do you have a link to information about the ingredient?
-
I empathize with your desire to have better answers for questions in cosmetic science. When I started in the industry, I was disappointed when I discovered how many questions didn’t have good answers. And it was a bit disheartening to know how difficult it would be just to get an answer to what seems like a simple question. But I digress..
Alright, now we’re getting closer to something we can test, conditioning and hair breakage.
If we stick with shampoo & we try to discover what is the ideal pH of shampoo to have the least amount of breakage?
Here are things to consider…
1. You can buy pre-damaged hair swatches. These would be better than damaging them yourself since the damage would be more uniform.
2. You’ll have to come up with a standard washing protocol including water temperature, pH, amount of shampoo, amount of time for wetting, rinsing, washing, and a washing technique (e.g. how to stroke the shampoo through the hair) plus a drying technique.
3. You’ll want to do a wider range of pH at first. Say 4.0, 7.0 and 9.0. Or maybe just test 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, & 9. You’ll have to do multiple tresses at each pH.
4. You’ll need a method for counting broken hairs. Of course you’ll have to decide if you comb the hair. If you do, you’ll have to standardize this.
5. You’ll need a standardized shampoo. You’ll want to start with the most simple shampoo you can make, so just surfactant and water.
6. You’ll also need to do all this testing blinded so you don’t bias your results.
And after you’ve run this experiment, if you do find statistically significant results, the only thing you will have really learned is the optimum pH for the surfactant system you tested, on hair tresses of the hair you tested. This information may (or may not) be generally applicable. This information may not even be applicable to hair growing on a person’s head, so the second phase of the study would have to involve a half-head salon test.
Now, if you change the surfactant system, you’d have to re-run the test. If you add a conditioning agent to the shampoo like a cationic polymer or a silicone, you’ll have to re-run the test. You quite likely will get different results.
So you’re still left with the question, what is the optimal pH for shampoo? Without testing a lot of different shampoos, you can’t really say. This isn’t even touching on the question of conditioners or other hair treatments.
All this is to illustrate that getting answers to such questions can be complicated.
-
Hair pH - Hair doesn’t have a pH since it’s a solid. It’s more proper to talk about hair’s isoelectric point. This is the “the moment of charge neutrality in a determined pH.” Hair is made of protein so it has + charges and - charges. The isoelectric point is what some people erroneously call the hair pH. (The reference book for information about the properties of hair is The Chemical & Physical Behavior of Human Hair.)
But even knowing the hair “pH” doesn’t answer the question of what is the ideal pH of a haircare formulation. What do you mean by ideal? This is not an objective question. This is a subjective question. What does the question mean? Is it the ideal pH to have the least stinging eyes? The ideal pH to remove the most hair sebum? The ideal pH to leave hair in the best condition? The ideal pH to have the least amount of breaking?
Then you could add to that, ideal pH using which surfactant or surfactant blend? You could add what’s the best pH for the condition of the hair or the shape of the hair. There are no simple answers.
Just think about it, if you were designing a study to determine which is the “ideal” pH for a shampoo, what study would you run? What characteristics would you measure?
The best we can do is to make some generalizations about what we think would be good. Shampoos with a pH range from 4.5 - 5.5 probably will be less irritating to the scalp so that seems like a reasonable range to shoot for. The cationic surfactants in conditioners probably will deposit better at a lower pH say 3.5 - 4.0. So, we formulate there. Maybe some system might work better at a higher pH? Who knows? You would have to experiment to find out.
I think what you are going to find is that there isn’t a lot of (good) published research about many things related to cosmetics. There are a few reasons for this.
1. Most “serious” scientists aren’t interested in the subject. Cosmetic science is an applied science with little opportunity to make groundbreaking discoveries, so there is no incentive for university researchers to spend much time delving deep into the subject.
2. Related to that, there is also not much money in terms of grants given to people to study the subject. And money that is paid usually comes from a big company like P&G or some raw material supplier who is specifically trying to prove something. Maybe an outfit like the Textile Research Institute may publish some basic hair research but they rely on customers who pay them to run studies. Much of what they discover they may not publish.
3. It’s a complicated subject. Many of the questions related to cosmetics are subjective ones. And that is the reality of all cosmetic research. The questions are mostly subjective and there are no simple answers to subjective questions.
This is also why you can take most people’s advice about characteristics of cosmetic products with a grain of salt. There are practically no universal rules when it comes to what makes the “ideal” hair care product.
-
For pearlizing effect, EGMS