Willow
Forum Replies Created
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There are dozens of stick blenders (immersion blenders) on Amazon in the US, and most of them would be fine for your purposes. We’re using a $15 immersion blender from Walmart right now for our small batch testing. If it can make mayonnaise it can make a lotion, unless your emulsifier is really finicky.
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Consider a dairy pasteurizer. They are capable of precise temperature control and incorporate low shear paddles. They have airspace heaters and water jackets so they heat precisely and quickly. I have a 30 gallon and two 4 gallon pasteurizers. They’re designed to an extremely high standard for sanitizability, because of the demands for milk processing. And I have a high volume systolic transfer pump so I can heat both phases to temperature and then transfer oil to water (because of the relative volumes that’s the direction i have to go) and apply high shear as the oil enters, them turn on the low shear mixer. I can even add cold water to the pasteurizer jacket if I wanted to cool the emulsion down faster. There’s minimal exposure to air, very clean process.
Mind you this isn’t a cheap solution, but it’s a really, really good one. I happened to operate a dairy on my farm at one time so I had the equipment. But if you can find this equipment used, it’s a better solution than most I’ve seen, shy of a fancy dedicated plant.
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Hi, I’m Catherine Harrison from Ohio, USA, and my company is Willowdale Botanicals. I’m the formulator (as well as the everything-else-or), and in my previous career was a neuroscientist, not trained as a chemist but with plenty of experience in biochem. I’ve got a BS in Physics and a PhD in neuroscience. I’ve lurked in the forum for a few years but I want to get more active so I thought I should say hi. I really, really appreciate this forum being available as a free resource. Coming into cosmetic chemistry sideways without formal training can be challenging and to all the experts in this forum being so generous with your time, thank you! I want to shout out to SwiftCraftyMonkey’s blog, too, without whom I’d not have learned enough to even show up here. Anyway, thank you Perry and everyone, and I’ll try not to be a fool or a pest (more than necessary).
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p.s. I still use Phytocide Elderberry, though not on its own. Elderberry extract has good support as an anti-microbial in responsible research journals in contexts not related to this particular preservative product.
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That Sambucus Nigra Extract is Phytocide Elderberry, sold as a preservative. I used it in combination with Silverion (silver citrate) successfully, and that’s probably what they’re doing here. However I also used a light blocking bottle (silver citrate is very unstable in light) and had leucidal-SF and chamomile essential oil in there. So there was a combination of natural so-so preservatives, and it was an expensive way to go - not to mention that the product was over 5% preservative ingredients.
