[Pharma]

@lmosca Nice to have someone here to discuss some organic chemistry .

I can’t agree on the Hofmann elimination. Elimination of trimethylamine (the fishy smell) can’t happen by
traditional Hofmann elimination, because betaine
is lacking a vicinal proton but has a carbonyl instead (being nitpicking here, I know). They also observed intramolecular methyl transfer (= dimethylglycine methyl ester) I find highly interesting and obviously standard decarboxylation.

What makes you think that a pH of 7 is the weakest spot?

I have to concur that solid state reactions are different to what we usually observe in our ‘chemical’ everyday life.

What I frequently observed (my wife isn’t too happy about my kitchen chemistry, you can believe me) when heating solutions or water-free melts of betaine or choline salts with compounds like sugars, carboxylic acids, or polyols on a water bath is that distinctive fishy smell which forms already after maybe 20 minutes at temperatures as low as 80°C. Also, replacing the quaternary ammonium compounds with amino acids results in an array of unfortunately too often not very pleasant scents due to Maillard type reactions (for non-chemists: that’s the reaction between amino acids and sugars which happens during cooking/baking and gives for example bread crust, grilled meat, or roasted coffee their typical flavours).

Although all my mixtures should have been stable under my kitchen conditions, they were not. This is likely due to the presence of moisture, air instead of inert nitrogen, and impurities as much as the fault of our nose which is fairly sensitive to certain compounds like said fishy smell.

[Pharma]

@lmosca I don’t see much usefulness coming from this paper for us… pyrolysis above something around 280°C. Who heats his cosmetics up that much? The one thing is that below this temp., they did not detect any degradation neither in an oxygen nor nitrogen atmosphere.

[Pharma]

Hong Kong is ‘officially’ China but has a bunch of privileges. Whether cosmetics fall into that category (economy in general does), I unfortunately don’t know. You could try contacting the embassy and ask there.

[Pharma]

Betaine aka trimethylglycine is very stable and you can cook, even bake, betaine or preparations thereof without any degradation . The only thing happening upon heating pure betaine hydrate is that it looses crystal water turning into anhydrous betaine at one point. It will only degrade if brought close to melting temperature of 300°C.

[Pharma]

No, COSMOS and Ecocert aren’t vegan, it was just an example. Like halal, you can have ingredients according to your religion (= halal) or you can get a ‘real’ Halal label (= no believe in Allah required), both are not necessarily the same although they should be interchangeable.

@Perry is a fare better reference regarding US regulations.

I’m from Switzerland, we do things differently. If you want to sell something with the name ‘Bio’ (=German/French for organic) on it, then it has to be 100% certified organic according to a label (with the label clearly visible) such as the countries official organic label (Bio Knospe). This goes so far, that traditional brands containing the word ‘bio’ in their company’s name or on a specific product line had to change/remove it because they weren’t organic. They weren’t even thinking about ‘organic’ since their name was older than the Knospe label itself.

TBH, I think the US organic concept sucks/lacks big times because it’s not that organic after all. Well, it’s better than nothing and it’s certainly more affordable than Swiss organics which costs approximately 3-5 times more than ‘normal’ stuff with a few exceptions at only 1.5-2 times the price.

[Pharma]

Traditionally, willowherb is used for different ailments such as prostate hyperplasia but there’s nothing in there which would back up any of these. Some antibacterial constituents have been found/isolated but there are probably more plants containing something which shows a somewhat activity in vitro than there are plants which really contain zip.

[Pharma]

PeaceLoveOrganics said:

…Benzyl Alcohol (and) Ethylhexylglycerin…

…Gluconolactone (and) Sodium Benzoate …

I wouldn’t feel safe especially with the second blend.

Gluconolactone plus benzoic acid won’t do the trick because gluconolactone is just an acid which drops pH and acts as sequestrant/chelant but not as preservative per se whereas benzoic acid is not sufficiently active against mould (and mould is also the one thing which often tolerates a lower pH).

Benzyl alcohol is good against Gram+ bacteria and moderately active against Gram- bacteria and yeast but insufficient for mould. Ethylhexylglycerin is said to be broad-spectrum and vapour phase active but I completely lack any scientific data to back up this manufacturer’s claim. My gut feeling tells me that this blend might be weak on the mould side of the spectrum (but again, this is just a hunch). I’d mix it with something strong on the yeast/mould side, just to be sure (which you should, given all the microbe food in your product). Maybe magnolia bark extract or else a general preservative booster.

[Pharma]

Let me give you some examples:

In case of hyaluronic acid, it won’t be okay because traditionally/originally, HA was obtained from rooster crests. Though this might have been from organically raised stock, it wouldn’t comply with a vegan label. ‘Modern’ HA is usually microbe derived and hence would automatically be compliant with any vegan label.

Levulinic and anisic acid, though originally isolated from plants, can be obtained through fermentation of sugar cane or isolated from star anise, respectively, or they may be fully synthetic. The former are automatically Ecocert/COSMOS compliant, the latter are not.

Stearic acid is also an example which may come from petrochemistry (not compliant with any label of your interest), could be obtained from tallow (not vegan), from palm oil (which may be from ‘bad’ rainforest-devastating and child labour monoculture or from sustainable and ‘label compliant’ production), or from ‘good’ sources such as coconut or canola which are always Ecocert/COSMOS compliant.

If you go by the Swiss organic label (Bio Knospe), no cosmetic product except unadulterated organic oils and traditional sodium and potassium soap are approved because all other types of cosmetics are regarded as not sustainable luxury goods and hence do not comply with the strict opinion regarding ‘organic’.

The EU organic label on the other hand is so tolerant as to allow for a certain amount of necessary additives which can not be produced according to the organic concept (this includes mostly preservatives). This organic label is approximately as strict as the Swiss standard agricultural label for integrated production (IP is the label most Swiss farmers adhere to).

Bio Knospe and EU organic both allow in different ways a certain visible declaration on the package if you use a mixture of organic and non-organic ingredients.

You see, depending on what you have from where, an ingredient may or may not automatically be compliant with the label you want to have.

[Pharma]

Perry said:

…
I know it’s just a name but a term like Chakra sets off my skeptical alarms as it is the kind of thing that woo woo peddlers use. It encourages “magical” thinking and short circuits rationally based beliefs.  At best marketing hype and at worst scammy. 

This type of thing probably appeals to consumers but in my view, scientists should not encourage it.

Sure, when it comes to these things, one should be careful and sceptical because most are scammers or crazy people, but by far not all. Magical thinking does not exclude science and it can be as rational as science. The German term for science is ‘Wissenschaft’, it means ‘creating knowledge’ and a scientist is ‘someone who creates knowledge’, or figures out how to explain/calculate something which was always there but could not be explained so far. Knowledge in my case (my scientific career was in the field of ethnobotany and pharmacognosy), came from hundreds and thousands of years old wisdom and folklore, knowledge of shamans and ‘witches’ of traditional herbal remedies and we used that as a first guide to the isolation and characterisation of active constituents. One of my hypotheses regarding the antiinflammatory activities of ginger was based on use and wisdom of Ayurveda and it was a good lead! I define myself as ‘spiritually inspired mad agnostic scientist’ because I know that I don’t know until I observe it with my own senses and still then, we don’t know shit. There is so much more to everything than meets the eye. Life can be partially explained by science but to a good part still remains unknown and inexplicable i.e. magick (with a k) is everywhere (it’s just not the kind of magic most people think of when they hear the term ‘magic’).

True, science should not encourage mumbo jumbo but science can learn a lot from it and by using things like ‘energy flows through our Chakras’, we can develop mentally/spiritually and this is in no way not scientific, it’s psychology and walking on the edge of the ever growing universe of science and knowledge. It’s just made non-scientific by too many neo-esoteric, hype people who don’t really get it and who also manage to turn science into mumbo jumbo.

[Pharma]

She has some inspiring, rather simple and more or less natural formulations. Pretty basic stuff but nothing like @Perry’s suspicion. BTW, Perry, it’s just a name and, for what it’s worth, 99% of the cosmetics world is, though sometimes science based, not science at all. I did work on some ‘science based’ research projects (under others with herbal extracts and cone snail venoms) for cosmetics, I know what I’m talking about: As sound as the scientific basis may be, the final product is not science but just a galenic base (water, oil, and emulsifier) with some pixie dust, often a story, loaded with marketing, and tons of packaging.

[Pharma]

Perry said:

…Organic acids destabilize emulsions.

It’s not an emulsion she/he is trying to copy

[Pharma]

HERE you go.

As a pharmacist, I prefer the safe and proven ones, which are often parabens and for oral preparations benzoic and sorbic acid (or their salts, respectively).

But as a hobby formulator, I love trying the ‘natural’ aka alternative or multifunctional ones (with some exceptions such as caprylhydroxamic acid, something I certainly don’t want on my skin).

There is only a ‘know if one works better for a particular project’ once you have done a challenge test . Sure, there are some in- and exclusion parameters but it’s even more vague with the new preservatives due to lacking experience and research.

[Pharma]

If you have a pH below 6, this by itself helps for preservation but most of all, you’re free to choose whichever preservative you like.

[Pharma]

I’d guess it’s in there as gelling agent. You could likely use many different kinds of polymers (except anionic ones) to thicken that product.

[Pharma]

1% seems a fair point to start from. Maybe just add that to plain water and see how it turns out.

Are you pH bound? At lower pH, levulinic and anisic acid come to mind. I’d also add a preservative booster such as pentylene glycol.

Regarding Leudical SF: Apart from marketing claims, I mainly hear not so good things about it. Maybe in a blend it’ll be okay. Dunno, never tried it myself. A restriction I see whit ferments such as Leucidal is that they supposedly contain bactericins which are often cationic peptide-like molecules and tend to interact with a lot of things, most of all with organic stuff such as plant extracts and with clays. Given that your benchmark is great microbial food, I’d be really careful with choosing preservatives. Cosphatec for example has a nice PDF which helps you choose appropriate (and often COSMOS approved) blends.

[Pharma]

Depends on what the job of the starch is. Might be just gelling, it could be to stabilise the emulsion, for optical benefits (silky appearance), to reduce an oily feel…

Do you know the composition of said 2-in-1 cleansing cream?

[Pharma]

Usually, it’s below 0.5%. Because this is below 1%, it means, the order isn’t necessarily errr… in order. If you get what I mean 🙂 .

[Pharma]

Correct, take tocopherol and not tocopheryl acetate.

First, tocopherol but not tocopheryl acetate protects your product and, as it seems, it’s more active in the skin as well because the acetate is too stable to hydrolyse within useful time. Theory meets biology… (and not that long ago I bought some toco acetate and thought it’s the real deal but alas, you never stop learning.)

[Pharma]

Glycerin content is greater than water content, the blend itself is self-preserved. By coincidence, I stumbled over some anhydrous oil gel formulations using Sapogel Q just yesterday. It’s by Skin Chakra and she’s also not preserving hers.

[Pharma]

Yes, really. However, normal starch is less effective regarding oil binding and may need more time for swelling. Obviously, it also depends on which starch you’re using because starch doesn’t equal starch.

[Pharma]

Don’t you need an emulsifier?

[Pharma]

Just as a sidenote: Castile and Marseille soaps from the supermarket are too often not what they claim to be but are modern syndets with a hint of a modified ingredient at the end of the label which could be interpreted as what marketing meant with ‘Castile or Marseille soap’… Believe me, I’ve been in enough French (that’s the folks who converted Castile to Marseille soap) supermarkets.

And I concur with the others, it’s chemically impossible to bring Castile soap’s pH down without turning soap into no-longer-soap.

[Pharma]

Heat? How hot and how long ?

For DIY small batches, no worries. Officially, they’re likely on the ‘add after cool-down’ side.

[Pharma]

Starch

Seriously, the answer is just ‘starch’.

[Pharma]

1. Enough to form a gel. % depend on pectin quality.

2. It’s sweet. Should some get into a customers mouth…

3. No idea, it’s not INCI conform AFAIK

4. Tocopheryl acetate is not vitamin E but an inactive derivative thereof

5. Preservations of that product is questionable

6. I wouldn’t use it as a benchmark… but that’s just my personal opinion