[Pharma]

Just a consideration: alkyl benzoate is ‘synthetic’. It can help dissolving all the EOs should your lotion require that benefit.

[Pharma]

Is it a DIY product? Simply try all the ingredients .

Unlikely: glycerol (sweet), propylene glycol (can give a hot taste), polyisobutene, dimethicone, cetearyl dimethicone crosspolymer, xanthan gum

Rancid oils have a bitter taste e.g. old Tween 80 or PEG-40 HCO.

[Pharma]

Rosemary extract is obtained by alcohol or acetone extraction and is hence oil soluble. However, depending on the product, it may contain other ingredients to render it better water or better oil soluble.

As an antioxidant, the rule of thumbs is ~0.1%.

A natural tocopherol mixture seems to be less likely to show pro-oxidant activity if used at higher amounts compared to purified alpha-tocopherol.

[Pharma]

With fragrances, parts may actually be a ‘valid’ measure. Regarding scent profile, relative amounts of the different EO matter. Total amount simply imparts more or less scent to the final product and that is up to the manufacturer’s likings.

[Pharma]

Skin penetration of SAP (and MAP) is very likely poorer than for LAA.

The 10% comparison is not always evident: Is it 10% by weight or by mol (= 10% relative to the AA part)?

Cellular uptake of AA is also better than for SAP/MAP. The latter requires to be taken up to be split into free and active AA.

You would have to dig through scientific literature to see whether someone actually bothered to compare the two forms in a skin test. I doubt you’ll find much…

[Pharma]

Salt can also act, depending on quantity, as preservative .

If one uses your scrub, does it get wet and stay wet for a prolonged period of time like a piece of soap in the showers? If yo, then you (or rather your consumers) are better off with a preservative (by preference, one strong against fungi).

[Pharma]

Most fragrances don’t care .

[Pharma]

What is already in your balm?

Retinoids worst enemies are oxygen, light (UV) and heat.

Freezing is not an option (obviously), light can be kept out of your product using the right packaging, and air entering during usage can be excluded with an airless dispenser systems…. leaving you with oxygen already in your balm and introduced during homogenisation and filling.

[Pharma]

hobbiz said:

There is also an alternative to Ultrez 21, which is Ulcatrez 20 I think, same INCI…

The same INCI doesn’t mean much when it comes to complex polymers . Not even simple chemicals have to be chemically identical just because they have the same INCI (unfortunately cosmetics doesn’t know IUPAC nomenclature).

[Pharma]

Precipitates from tap water are especially formed at alkaline pH. Depending on how much NTA you added (or TDS in your tap water, respectively), the only metal hydroxide which still may precipitate is magnesium hydroxide.

[Pharma]

From an industrial point of view: ‘synthetic’ or ‘re-assembled’ triglycerides have a very low batch to batch variation whereas the same fractions from fractionated oil will reflect origin, growing conditions, seasonal changes etc. to a certain degree. For DIY, this is negligible but for big brands with even bigger price tags, every pot and every tube needs to be identical even after years on the market.

[Pharma]

Hi Mary

What do you expect from your formulations? A: nicely looking products with appealing sensorials, B: traditional herbal medicine, or C: evidence based medicine? For each of these, you should look for a different type of help, namely A: a standard cosmetic chemist, B: an alternative/complementary health care ‘professional’, C: a pharmacist or similar. I fall into category C and depending on the traditional medicine you’re interested in (e.g. European, Ayurveda, TCM, or whatever else there is on this planet) possibly also in category C. I’m a pharmacist with state of the art formulation education (seems that this is not common for pharmacists in many countries) for about 20 years. I’m also a hobby formulator and love herbal remedies and medicinal plants. And, well, I hold a PhD in herbal and botanical medicine so to speak (we
call it pharmacognosy and phytochemistry) and keep (and groom) dogs for
roughly 14 years.

Feel free to send me a PM (not going to post my mail publicly because of spam).

BTW in which country are you based? Your phone number lacks an international area code.

[Pharma]

Tocopherol, ascorbyl palmitate and/or other phenolic antioxidants. Synthetic ones would be for example BHT.

[Pharma]

Some oils like rosehip oil come as cold pressed oil or CO2 extract. Solvent extracted edible/machine oils are cheaper than extra vergine oils. Using CO2 instead of solvents is a nice thing. It increases yield but may boost costs; since it is an ‘extract’, higher production costs are easily amortised by higher sales prices and are beneficial for marketing. Differences between cold pressed and CO2 can be minor and, depending on the method and type of secondary constituents, differ in a ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ way for either of the two.

Regarding plant extracts: Read also my lengthy post HERE where the bottom line is that plant extracts can be active but maybe, more often than not, show as good as no benefit in cosmetics.

[Pharma]

Caprylic/Capric Triglycerides are traditionally obtained by fractioning coconut oil but I’ve also found products (forgot which ones) obtained by esterification of purified caprylic/capric acids with glycerol. This means, they can be identical or at least from a chemical point of view different.

[Pharma]

Stem cells sound cool and are perfect for marketing. There might be stuff in there which does work but that’s just coincidence because:

A: Plant stem cell extracts are just expensive plant extracts (apple stem cells are also frequently found in cosmetics; an apple purée mask is likely more effective, more ecological, and costs a fraction of a stem cell extract).

B: Plant hormones are completely different from animal hormones. Just think about salicylic acid.

C: Genetic and epigenetic information stops working once the cell gets extracted and it’s not transposable (fortunately, or everyone who’s eating ketchup would turn into a tomato)

I did read the publication on apple stem cells (maybe it was the one who triggered that whole boom?) because it’s a ‘local’ one… I think I’m quite smart but I didn’t get that one, especially not the how and why immortality and improved growth of plant cells in petri dishes should improve skin rejuvenation. It’s just not logic, like so many Hollywood Sci-Fi movies are cool as long as your TV is on but your brain is not.

Might give your link a try…

[Pharma]

If you were to use sodium lauroyl methyl isethionate instead of SCI, the product is said to be easily thickened with salt or betaine.

[Pharma]

If a manufacturer recommends a product, then it’s supposed to be the right one. Besides, it’s all about potassium and that’s in both liquids .

I’ve honestly never really thought about preservatives in calibration liquids… it should be water soluble (the more the better) and pH neutral. Hence, phenoy and parabens should work although I’d be careful with more lipophilic ones. Careful means: Clean your electrode well, for example with a solvent such as IPA (something you’re likely doing anyway after measuring creams) and don’t use them for storing the electrode. That’s the beauty about KCl, it’s just KCl and water.

[Pharma]

If something ‘works’ in skincare beyond effects approved for cosmetics (those @Perry mentioned), then it’s no longer a cosmetic ingredient but a pharmaceutical drug. It’s also not as easy to formulate a pharmaceutically effective topical product as it seems. Most ‘technologies’ used by cosmetics industries are adapted copy-paste formulations found in proof of concept scientific publications which, at best, show preliminary in vitro data.

Yes, many ingredients such as plant extracts work and are therefore used in pharmaceuticals but the amount, type, and quality of the used ingredient/extracts is often different between the two businesses. As an example: Green tea extract used in ‘drugs’ (Veregen) is added as refined speciality extract at 10% and 15 g cream cost over 70$ (it’s that cheap because Veregen is covered by basic health insurance in Switzerland, else, it would cost way more). Other extracts colour the whole cream/gel dark brown if added in sufficient amounts; quite useless for cosmetics. Topical proteins usually don’t work and have to be administered using syringes (example: botox). Peptides are allowed as cosmetic ingredients because they show no effect once applied to intact skin and they usually show no useful effect whatsoever (in vitro data my be statistically significant*). Many peptides and other fancy expensive ingredients are also quite unstable.

* If something is statistically significant, it’s only different for a computer. Curcumin as an example of a trendy lifestyle nutrient supplement/nutraceutical: In vitro, it’s the silver bullet against maybe EVERY single disease and health issue mankind ever had without showing any signs of side effects. Alas, it’s assimilation is piss poor and doesn’t exceed very low ng/ml serum levels. Combining it with piperine (hot stuff from black pepper) is an old trick used in ayurvedic medicine and statistically, the combo does work by increasing serum levels by a factor of 8. This still gives low ng/ml levels whereas pharmaceutical effects are observed in the ug/ml range (factor 1’000 higher). Synthetic derivatives which showed better pharmacokinetics turned out to be toxic. On the contrary, many plant extracts and ‘cosmeceuticals’ show in vitro effects in the mg/ml range, which is 1’000 times more than physiologically achievable but doable in vitro.

Am I a reliable source? I did my PhD at ETH Zurich and a PostDoc at EPGL Geneva both on medicinal plants. I used to work not just with plants and extracts thereof but many pure compounds, synthetic drugs and proteins in vitro, ex vivo and even a bit in vivo. My PhD lab was mostly an organic chemistry lab where synthetic derivatives of natural products were synthesised. My professor was a former leading scientist at Novartis and hence, expectation for plant extracts were the same as for pharmaceuticals. Hence, we were amongst those pharmacognosy and phytochemistry groups who believed that for a plant preparation the same rules and stringent criteria have to apply as for any other drug. This is not evident and many ‘herbal’ researchers still believe that a plant is potentially active if constituents show in vitro effects at high ug/ml or even low mg/ml concentrations and that’s about as good and helpful as homoeopathy. On the other hand, I have not just an academic first hand experience of how poorly available and fragile proteins and peptides are but also because I’m a pharmacist and we sell that stuff.

There are literally thousands upon thousands of scientific publications out there which tell you how great something is but once you try to get the effect in a human being, your only result is disappointment. In drug discovery, out of >100’000 tested new compounds, only one (with luck) will turn out to be a suitable pharmaceutical candidate, development takes over a decade and costs tens of millions of $. In cosmetics, some researchers publish something with a weak but ‘marketable’ effect on a trendy subject (preferably derived from some cheap and established resource**) and ZAPP, less than a year later a ‘new, better, and more efficient’ product hits the market. Doesn’t that sound fishy?

** Such publications are common for example for Thailand because projects on indigenous plants with main focus on established crops are financially supported by the government. As nice as the idea behind this is, the majority of the projects just waste money and do ‘search until found’, useful or not is secondary.

[Pharma]

@ngarayeva001 Just found another goldie (‘k, it’s not one of your beloved silocones but from Evonik… 🙂 ): CLICK

[Pharma]

Gunther said:

amitvedakar said:

what about ETO sterilizaion? @Pharma . Sanitizer used to sterilize. Is it require to to sterilize it?

…
As far as I know, 0.45 um filtering ain’t truly sterile.

The gamma irradiated bottles will be the hard part.
Hence why I was considering soaking them in glutaraldehyde solution and rinsing with sterile filtered water.

Ethylene oxide could be an option too…

Depending on the definition of sterile and also the type of liquid and it’s application, 0.45 um can be acceptable (I usually used 0.2 um).

Washing is not an option because you would have to dry the bottles somehow and glutaraldehyde is neither an approved nor safe method (and requires 1000 l glutaraldehyde solution and at least 3-5000 l sterile water).

I can only tell you about personal experience (I used to work in BSL2 labs for years) and how it is in Switzerland.

I worked with untested human blood, multiresistant pathogenic bacteria, cancer and primary cell lines, radioactive material, and unstable, highly reactive, and deadly chemicals. It’s easier to keep something in your bottles than out of them! It’s also easier to train people to handle bottles with potentially deadly content than teaching them to work under aseptic conditions.

Here, if you want something labelled ‘sterile’, it has to be registered which means your company has to be approved. Getting approval for sterile production is probably second to opening a lab which deals with SARS, Ebola and other deadly diseases. You will have to build a clean room (or a clean building), deal with authorities, pay fees, remodel sanitary and ventilation installations, train your staff, set up many SOPs, test raw materials, do in-process controls, and determine end product quality, set up a microbiology lab, deal with more authorities, run, evaluate, and re-run your whole process using hundreds of litres and bottles, adjust SOPs and write more SOPs, re-train staff, get document signed, pay more fees… we’re talking about an investment of easily more than 10 million $ over more than 2 years before you may not even get a ‘good to go’!

What small to medium companies do here is outsourcing sterile production to approved manufacturers even if they produce on a regular basis over years .

BTW this is regarding production of liquids. It’s easier for hard
materials using ethylene oxide or gamma radiation where standardised
equipment exists. You could hence try to ‘nuke the living sh”*ç’ out of your bottles… but getting a giant ray gun just for a bathtub full of sanitiser???

[Pharma]

What about phenoxyethanol and a glycol (such as Lexgard HPO)? Alternatively, thiazolidinones should work. I wouldn’t use formaldehyde releasers because they might (at least over time) affect a glass electrode.

I guess that IPA is likely added at low amounts to increase solubility/fluidity and less for preservation because higher % alcohol will affect pH. The combo of IPA and PEG reduces water activity but is that enough? BTW phthaleine dyes show some antimicrobial activity .

As storage solution, KCl is recommended for glass electrodes.

I never use the pH 10 solution… Unless you’re into perm products, who cares whether or not the meter ain’t accurate at an alkaline pH?

[Pharma]

As @Perry said, chirality is important for biological systems and hence pharmaceuticals, but sometimes, just sometimes, chirality has also an effect on physics. Something deep in my brain tells me that there are a few cosmetics ingredients with a mild difference between stereoisomers… it wasn’t simple acids.

[Pharma]

If there’s no gelling agent, the right type/material of membrane will work well for alcoholic aqueous solutions. Question is rather, what ‘they’ understand with ‘sterile’. If they really mean sterile, you will have to use gamma irradiated containers which are then filled in a sterile/aseptic environment (for example using underpressure filtration through 0.2 or 0.45 um membranes directly into sterile bottles) and tightly sealed. By preference, you’ll using a pump system for the bottles with a sterile filter like those used for preservative-free eye drops to keep it sterile throughout usage period.

Which quantity are you intending to produce?

[Pharma]

Does anyone have experience with hydroxyethyl urea? It’s said to be more stable and allegedly even more hydrating than urea…