[Pharma]

What has squalene (an unsaturated hydrocarbon, not a carbohydrate) to do with all this?

The explanation by @maria does look like a good explanation. All you have to do is let your harvest, prior to oil extraction, stay around and it’ll ferment on its own. This technique isn’t new; it’s one of the key steps in making good chocolate/cacao.

[Pharma]

Phytic acid is mostly sodium phytate wrongly labelled as phytic acid.

I don’t see a reason why you couln’t swap it.

[Pharma]

Conditioning is mainly done by the cationics whilst fatty alcohols give the creamy consistancy (the more fatty alcohol, the higher viscosity).

Aim for a whole numbered ratio between 1:1 and 1:6 (at least, that’s what the science behind it dictates -> in cosmetics, always regard theory with caution and prove it right or wrong by trial and error).

[Pharma]

Preservatives: Benzoate, sorbate, and glycerin (propylene glycol may be possible) or sugar alcohols. The other glycols are not edible as far as I know (they’re at least not properly tested). Glyceryl monoesters are used as food processing aids, though I’m not sure if glyceryl caprylate is amongst them…

Chelates: Citrate and phytate.

[Pharma]

The mentioned effect is mostly driven by pH .

Uh… key words???? ‘Conditioner’ is all I remember LoL (sorry)!

[Pharma]

Fermented XYZ does not mean that pure XYZ has been digested by microbes but often, that XYZ has been added to water containing all necessary things for microbial live, including added sugar. Wheter or not the process converts any of the XYZ remains elusive. In case of oils (triglycerides), there are several ways how it could go. A: nothing happens, B: secreted lipases hydrolise the triglycerides into glycerin (which may be digested = turns into water and CO2) and free fatty acids, and/or C: microbes digest the oil (some microbes even prefer fatty acids over carbohydrates as carbon source) and leave nothing but their excrements floating in the soup.

Question is: Is there a benefit? Does the oil become more valuable? Well… cosmetic knows for decades that some ferments are actually highly valued by consumers. As an educated guess, I’d say that the broth from the used microbes (which are often food processing, proven to be safe, microbes) is often very similar no matter what you feed them as long as you feed them well.

[Pharma]

Just as a ‘nice to know’: Alkyl benzoate is like a HLB emulsifier with a negative value, so to speak. It’s so lipophilic that it does not interact with a water phase but only with the interphase. Meaning, it acts like an emulsifier for different polarity oils and quasi-oils .

[Pharma]

JonahRay said:

Why bisabolol? Isn’t it oil soluble?

It is, but it’s also glycerin soluble. And this could explain the greasy/oily appearence of the ‘exudate’.

BTW w/o emulsifiers wouldn’t just emulsify glycerin in oil but can also help dissolving different polarity oils in each other (like in your case three: triglycerides, hydrocarbons, and silicones). However, it doesn’t always work…

[Pharma]

It’s not the surface you see but the one in between molecular layers; you’d have to be a water molecule or similar to see it. A bit like a slice of cream cake where the puff paste is the hair and the vanilla cream the conditioner, the closer the paste layers to each other, the less cream… sort of… :smiley:

[Pharma]

I suspect that it’s a mixture of glycerin and bisabolol .

[Pharma]

EDTA becomes increasingly less soluble at low pH (and vice versa); GLDA’s solubility is less pH sensitive. However, you use it at a low concentration and the main issue you’ll see is the slow speed at which they dissolve (you’re unlikely hitting solubility limits). To speed up dissolution, use a smaller amount of water with a higher pH to make a concentrated stock solution. Some shampoo ingredients come at high pH, maybe use these to dissolve the chelates (especially if you make products for your personal use) 😉 .

BTW EDTA is often more effective (stronger binding at lower pH) whilst GLDA is better for nature in several regards.

[Pharma]

@Graillotion Maybe call it ‘Deodorant with natural actives’ or ‘A natural way to fight sweating, free from aluminum salts’?

[Pharma]

You might try adding a w/si emulsifier (such as DOWSIL ES-5600 or maybe readily available PGPR or PEG-10 dimethicone?) if you have to use glycerin. Depending on the emulsifier, you’ll have to tweak your formulation a wee bit.

Alternatively, using a sorbent (such as unmodified silica) for glycerin could work as well… however, there are several drawbacky to that strategy.

[Pharma]

The stock solution would be what’s in your bottle, the ‘actual cleansing product’ is shampoo and water on your hair .

[Pharma]

Isoionic is what you get in pure water, it’s for most cases a hypothetical state. Isoelectric is closer to reality due to presence of counterions, other electrolytes, and pH active substances.

The trick is to create enough binding opportunities, either by increasing the amount of negative charges on hair so that positive charged conditioning agents can electrostatically bind (like magnets of opposite poles attracting each other) or by increaseing surface. Someone here on board posted a link to a paper explaining how this actually works a few months ago. The problem with hair is that there are always positive and negative charges and these attract or reject each other. This results in higher or lower hydrophilicity/lipophilicity and accessibility/’swellability’ of the ‘layers’ (constituted mostly of proteins and fatty acids).

The different effects are working against each other and hence, there is no easy answer/solution. What seems to me as most favourable and which also reflects the prefered use of acidic conditioning is the denser structure of hair with ‘layed down’ keratin scales at low pH.

[Pharma]

No. Salt only changes the stock solution, not the actual product (which is diluted with lots of water). Also, micelle size does not correlate with cleaning power.

[Pharma]

THIS resource is worth gold (it’s been written by a professor and fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, links theory and practive, it’s interactive, and best of all, it’s free too).

[Pharma]

Under physiological conditions, the notion of ‘isoelectric point’ applies.

However, what’s you gain in knowing a hypothetical value (or rather a range, certainly not a fixed two decimal number)? As you can see HERE, chemical composition of hair depends on many variables and hence, the isoelectric point shifts all the times. It also depends on the site of the hair, how you treat you hair, age, and so on…

[Pharma]

Maybe start with something like THESE first or even THAT? At least, those options would allow you to answer some of the questions in above post which an article on ascorbic acid degradation likely won’t.

[Pharma]

@ggpetrov Just a few general points:

- Rheology modifiers aren’t always polymers (true, most are).

- Rheology as a colloquial term may refer to feel, viscosity, spreading behaviour, stability, hydration and speed of evaporation, and other effects.

- Polymers may be added for any of these reasons. Depending on the aim, the time of addition can differ.

- Proposed reading: Rheology Modifiers Handbook by D. B. Braun & M. R. Rosen.

- The believe system (mentioned by @ketchito ) that emulsions are micellar structures is only true for some semisolid preparations. The modern view is (but may still be inaccurate or incomplete) that onion skin like lamellar liquid crystals encircle oil droplets. This by itself modifies rheology and stability. It’s these crystalline structures which tend to be distrubed by too early gelling of the water phase. If an emulsion relies on lamellar liquid crystals (which is the case with several emulsifiers like diverse glucoside and polyglyceryl esters and possibly all mixtures with fatty alcohols), gelling should be done after formation of those liquid crystal structures. It may work with early gelling as well but the outcome will not be the same. Sure, it depends on the % and type of polymer you’re adding and why you’re using it.

- Ever wondered why formulations with ‘newer’ and ‘eco-friendly’ emulsifiers sometimes take a few days to ‘ripen’? I wondered too… turns out that the they need as long because of the formation of lamellar liquid crystals. Because the first step depends on diffusion, a higher viscosity is bad. The second step is rearrangements and changes in crystal modification where polymers don’t interfere.

[Pharma]

Most cosmetic polymers aren’t microplastic. Only microbeads and, obviously, packaging are ‘hard to digest’ for mother nature. The water gelling and swelling polymers aren’t considered microplastic.

[Pharma]

10/0.7=14.3

4/0.99=4.05

Been a while since school, eh? :smiley:

[Pharma]

If you want to create a w/o emulsion, it usually takes a bit more than just glyceryl monostearate… GMS alone is a poor emulsifier and, depending on composition, is not even behaving like an emulsifier but a co-emulsifier, lamellar liquid crystal promoter, or oil gellant.

What type of oil (silicone?) are you using? Viscosity of the oil and water phase?

[Pharma]

Depends on the quality you expect and your definition of small scale.

If you have the right connections and work for example with an university (find a PhD who does it parallel to his/her work using students as guinea pigs), you might get away with a lot less $$ . As an alternative, find someone who runs the analysis (PCR, agar plates, or whatever) and get a few coworkers, friends, and family to play the part of the volunteers (use force, intrigues, blackmail etc. if they don’t volunteer voluntarily 🙂 ).

Skin microbiome is still a very complex and poorly understood topic. Cosmetics and more so marketing people still love it (it’s new, it’s fancy, it’s hyped)! You just have to figure out what you want to measure or rather how you want to twist, tweak, exaggerate, and/or ignore the outcomes of the cheapest test you can run in order to fit your marketing claims.

If you want something like a real phase I double-blind placebo controlled clinical trial… pharma prices are in the 10-20 tousand $ per volunteer, rising for successive phases. Clinical trials are never cheap. That’s why cosmetics does it a bit differently and, as a consequence, why cosmetic publications are usually very poorly made, are biased and unreliable… in other words, they just suck.

[Pharma]

Yes, it’s pretty much water soluble plastic.

The free, unreacted monomers, acrylic acid derivatives, are highly reactive, toxic, carcinogenic, and allergenic (and are obviously 100% petrochemicals). I also wonder why they’re not on the ‘bad guys’ list alongside PEG, sulfate surfactants, and parabens.

Because they are inert polymers (like PEGs), they pose no health concern to human sink and are safe to use.

Unlike insoluble plastics, they do degrade in nature.