Thanksgiving Ingredients in your Cosmetics

As a cosmetic formulator, you can find some fun stuff by looking through the INCI dictionary. In honor of the US Thanksgiving holiday, today we’re going to do a post on Thanksgiving ingredients used by cosmetic formulators.

Turkey

Tryptophan is a common component of turkey and it’s also an ingredient you will find in some cosmetic products. It is actually used in testing to show the extent to which hair is damaged by UV rays. In formulating, tryptophan is useful as an antistatic agent or hair conditioner.

Stuffing

No turkey dinner would be complete without some bread stuffing. One of the primary components of bread is flour and the cosmetic ingredient dictionary is packed with derivatives of flour. You’ve got skin conditioning ingredients like Triticum Aestivum Flour Lipids and Hydrolyzed Wheat Flour. Then you have bulking agents like Panicum Miliaceum Seed Flour and Arachis Hypogaea Flour.

Gravy

Since gravy is a combination of meat drippings, flour and butter, we’ll focus on the butter ingredients because we’ve already covered the first two. In the INCI dictionary there are a whopping 70 ingredients with the name ‘butter’ in them. As you can imagine most are conditioning emollients like Butter Glycerides or Butter Decyl Esters. Others are surfactants like Shea Butteramidopropyl Betaine and Shea Butteramidopropyltrimonium Chloride.

Cranberry

You can’t go wrong on Thanksgiving with some Hydrogenated Cranberry Seed Oil. This emollient is sure to spice up your skin lotion. And if skin protection is what you’re after, try Hydrolyzed Cranberry Fruit/Leaf Extract. It works (according to the raw material supplier).

Potatoes

Ah, mashed potatoes are not only good to eat, they also make an excellent viscosity controlling ingredient. If you need to thicken your cosmetic formula, try Hydrogenated Potato Starch. Of course, if you are looking for a hair and skin conditioning ingredient, Hydrolyzed Potato Protein is the way to go.

Pumpkin Pie

For the dessert course, pumpkin pie is a classic. It also has led to a number of cosmetic ingredients. There is Hydrogenated Pumpkin Seed Oil and Pumpkin Seed Oil PEG-8 Esters for your skin moisturizing needs. Then there is Pumpkin Fruit Extract Beta-Glucan which is supposed to have an antidandruff effect although it’s not an approved antidandruff active so beware.

Well, that’s it for the tour of Thanksgiving Cosmetic Ingredients.

Have a happy holiday everyone!