Monday, March 19, 2012

Would you start a bakery using a Duncan Hines recipe?

As I stood making cupcakes this morning - it's National Social Worker appreciation day this week some time, and my team at work decided we would send some treats over to our local social workers to appreciate them - I figured out the perfect metaphor for an issue that has been bothering me...

I'm always perplexed by requests I get from people saying something like this..."I'm developing a line of skin care products and I want you to help me do it as I've never made anything before." I find this confusing. Would you decide to start a clothing line having never cut out a pattern or threaded a needle? Would you decide to start a woodworking company having never owned a hammer or cut a piece of wood? So why would you start a skin care line when you've never made so much as a lotion bar or body butter? It would be like starting a bakery when you've only ever made cupcakes from a boxed recipe! 

You're just asking for trouble when you don't know what you're doing and have to rely upon the free advice of people like me to make your business successful. There's a reason this is called a craft - we're craftspeople who have worked hard to hone our skills, and there's much more to making products than just making a recipe in your workshop. You have to learn what information you can trust, which suppliers you can rely on, which recipes work the best in your climate, which containers look awesome and keep your products safe, and so on. To think that you can just follow a recipe and start selling it a few weeks later is simply ridiculous: I would argue you need at least a year just to test the stability of your products, let alone all the time you need to perfect your recipes.

Please don't be offended when I write back to you with the comment that I don't help businesses for free. I don't help businesses for money, either. I don't have time to help your business succeed. I wish you all the best, but it's not fair to ask me to give you my time for free so you can make a profit. 

Terry Pratchett wrote, "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." Resolve to be on fire instead of begging for a match! 

As a note, it's National Community Social Service Workers' Day on November 6th, so I guess we do get a celebration as well! 

Look for more posts later this week - it's so busy around here, and now it's Spring Break, so it's even busier! 

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Questions I've seen this week on cetyl alcohol

Let's take a look at a few questions that ended up in the comment box this week!

Kari posed this question in this post on cetyl alcohol: Hi! I recently bought your e-books from Lotion Crafter and had a question about adding Cetyl Alcohol to the conditioner when there isn't a lot of oil. Is it possible to use it when you have only a very small amount of oil? I've tried adding it, and it ends up gritty in the formula.

I'm not sure why it would end up gritty because you can add quite a bit of cetyl alcohol to a conditioner without problem because the BTMS-25 or BTMS-50 acts as an emulsifier for any fatty ingredients - like cetyl alcohol - in the product. With 4% BTMS-25 or BTMS-50, you can add up to about 10% in the heated oil phase without any problems. Having said this, I'm really not sure about the grittiness you're feeling.

Has anyone else had problems with grittiness and cetyl alcohol?

Anonymous asked in the same post: I have some ingredients around, and I want to make a leave in conditioner, with a lotion consistency. I was wondering if it is possible to do this using ONLY cetyl alcohol as the primary emulsifier? Would it even work, and would it have enough slip? I do have BTMS, but was just wanting to experiment without it.

No, for two reasons. Cetyl alcohol is not an emulsifier, so you'd end up with your oil phase floating on top of your water phase. And two, it isn't positively charged, so you wouldn't have a conditioner at all. Cetyl alcohol on its own doesn't do much for your hair - it might moisturize it as it is a nice emollient on its own - and you really need the cationic quaternary compound like BTMS-50, BTMS-25, Incroquat CR, cetrimonium bromide, and so on to behave as the conditioning agent and the emulsifier!

Happy Pi day!

It's the most wonderful time of the year! We've just enjoyed Mole Day (Commonwealth date, 6-02 or February 6th), and now it's Pi Day! (March 14. 3-14. Get it? The first numbers of pi!) In honour of this day, may I suggest you find the circumference of something? (That's 2 ∏ r, in case you've forgotten!) I'm thinking my family might enjoy a coconut cream pie before my math exam at 7 pm tonight!

Want to learn more about Pi Day? Check out the Wikipedia link on the topic and meet the creator, Larry Shaw. He looks awesome!

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Choosing a moisturizer recipe!

Click here for the original post from March 4, 2011...

The first step in making a moisturizer is to learn your skin type. Some of us can't stand any oils on our skin and some of us can slather on shea butter and still feel like we need a little more moisturizing. I recommend your first stop should be in the skin chemistry & types section of this blog. Figure out what your skin needs and then choose your ingredients accordingly.

The second thing is to decide on a recipe. My standard recipe is an 80% water recipe, but you can have a higher or lower water phase depending upon your needs. I find the 80% water recipe allows me to have a nice oil phase (or oil free phase, depending on the recipe) and a nice water phase. If you have very dry skin or want a night cream, you could go down to a 70% water recipe. (The recipe I'll be using as a starting point contains 88.5% water, but we're going to play with it quite a bit.)

When choosing your oil based ingredients, consult a list of comedogenic or acnegenic oils and butters (this seems like a good list). Using a non-comedogenic oil doesn't mean you won't break out: It just means it's less likely to clog your pores. Take these ratings with a grain of salt. As I mention in the post on comedogenicity, most of these ratings are based on rabbit ear tests, so their effect on human skin can be quite different. So you really need to figure out what works for you, and that will take time and patience. Yes, you're going to use a lot of ingredients - known by some as "wasting" our ingredients - as you try to figure out what your skin likes and what you can afford to make.

Here are a few recipes to consider as we learn to formulate moisturizers...

Swift's 80% water moisturizer (basic recipe)
Formulating moisturizers in general
Formulating moisturizers for dry skin
Formulating moisturizers for wrinkled skin
Formulating moisturizers for oily skin
Silicone based moisturizers
Facial moisturizer with hemp seed oil
Facial moisturizer with sea buckthorn oil
Facial moisturizer with sunflower oil
Oil free facial moisturizer
Another formulating moisturizer post with ideas for additives
Formulating a moisturizer with additives (part two)
Leave-in conditioners become moisturizers (moisturizers with BTMS-50)

As a note, there's no reason that a very light lotion can't be used as an eye cream! 

Click here for the next post I wrote last year about making moisturizers...
Click here for a post on using cosmeceuticals in a moisturizer for dry skin...

Why neglect yourself?

I regularly see people asking if it's okay to use a failed lotion or a product without preservatives and they justify it by saying, "Well, it's just for me". Aren't you worth a good lotion, a product that is well preserved, or a product that has a ton of great stuff in it? Isn't that why we get into making our products, so we can make something lovely and decadent or decadent and affordable? Why don't you think you're worth it? 

An aside...I think the keeping of failed lotions is more about not wanting to waste ingredients. It's too late. Throw it away and chalk it up to experience so you don't make another failed lotion! 

Sunday, March 11, 2012

What have we learned so far about making products for our skin?

So let's see what we've learned so far about our skin and how to make products for it! 

Our skin is made up of many layers, and the uppermost one is the stratum corneum. Moisturizing is all about preventing transepidermal water loss by trapping water against our skin through emollients. Hydrating is all about bringing water to our skin by attracting it through humectants. And occlusives make sure that these good things stay near our skin so we can be moisturized and hydrated. So when we create a moisturizing ingredient, we want something that will form an occlusive barrier between our skin and the world to keep the moisture in and the world and its nasty wind, cold, rain, snow, and sun out!

Humectants draw water from the atmosphere to our skin and help moisturize. When we attract water to our skin from the atmosphere or apply lotions containing water to our skin, the water dissolves the molecules found in the natural moisturizing factor or NMF, and they act as humectants in our skin drawing water from the atmosphere. (The major components of this NMF is sodium lactate, urea, and pyrrolidone carboxylic acid (or sodium PCA), all great humectants.) We've also learned that there is the potential for some humectants to draw water out of the skin if conditions get very dry. But we've also learned that using occlusive ingredients will prevent this potential from becoming a reality.

So we want to make our products with three main goals in mind...
1. Drawing water to our skin (humectants);
2. Creating a barrier so the water can't get out (occlusives); and
3. Using emollients to make our skin feel smooth and lovely (emollients).

I use these three concept in every lotion I make. I generally have a humectant in the water or cool down phase, and emollients and occlusives in the oil phase or cool down phase (in the case of silicones). If you take a look at anything other than the basic recipes, you'll see I always have humectants, occlusive, and emollients in my products.

Related posts:
An updated overview of our skin
What are penetration enhancers?
What's the difference between moisturizing and hydrating?
Does glycerin pull water out of our skin when the humidity is low?
Skin chemistry and types section of the blog

Saturday, March 10, 2012

And this is why we need time to see what happens with our products......

This product was originally aqua coloured, and now it's an opaque green with a slightly brown tinge that you can't see in the picture. We made this Blue Raspberry fragranced body wash at the end of November with the plan of giving it out at Christmas...and by then, it had morphed into this green colour. It's no big deal for me as it still feels and smells lovely, but if you're someone who is selling a product or making something that has to be a certain colour for an event - a birthday, a wedding, and so on - this would be a catastrophe.

Fragrances and essential aren't the inert ingredients we think they are, and they can have an impact on the colour of your product. Vanilla can turn your product a browny colour (and if you've ever made bath bombs with a vanilla-y fragrance, you'll know what I mean!), and citrus fragrances can turn your product more orange than you'd intended.

This is one of the reasons you really need time if you're considering selling your products. Take a least a year to see how the products change with various fragrances or ingredients, how the preservative stands up, if you need more anti-oxidants or need to change your oils, and so on. (The other reason you need time is to learn your craft. Don't base your entire business on a recipe you didn't create yourself or one that you can't modify very easily! If you don't know how to do that, don't think about selling, please!)

Related posts:
Surfactants - fragrance and clarity
Surfactants - fragrance and viscosity
Surfactants and essential oils
Colouring surfactant mixes

Question: How do I figure out the volume of a recipe?

Let's say you want to make some conditioner, and you want 4 bottles of 8 ounces (about 240 ml) each. How do we figure it out from a recipe based on percentages or weight?

The short answer is that you make a 100 gram batch of the stuff, figure out the volume of it, then multiply that to get what you want. Or make a ton of it, bottle some for your friends, and keep the rest for yourself. (This is generally what I do!)

The long answer is almost the same in that it's hard to figure out what volume you'll see from a product based on a weighed recipe, and that's thanks to specific gravity. Pure water at 4 Celsius is our baseline for specific gravity and everything else is compared to it. Water weighs 1000 grams per litre - 1 kg per litre - or 1 gram per millilitre. So a teaspoon or 5 ml of water weighs 5 grams. A tablespoon or 15 ml of water weighs 15 grams. A cup of water at 250 ml weighs 250 grams.

If something is listed as being less than 1, it weighs less than water per gram. If something is more than 1, it weighs more than water per gram. If something has a specific gravity of 1.03, it means it weighs 1.03 grams for every 1 millilitre or 1030 grams per litre.

So if we see cetrimonium chloride listed as having a specific gravity of 0.93, we know this means it weighs 0.93 grams per 1 cc or 1 ml (or 930 grams per litre). Liquid Germall Plus has a specific gravity of 1.15 to 1.25. If you want 0.5% in a lotion and add it in volume at 0.5 ml to a 100 ml batch of lotion, you might have 0.575 to 0.625 ml preservative, which is above the 0.5% recommended!

A lot of oils have a specific gravity of 0.91 to about 0.95. So adding 1 cc or 1 ml safflower oil (specific gravity 0.90) would only add 0.9 grams of oil to your lotion. If you're making a 100 ml batch and you're wanting 10% oil in the product, using 10 ml of oil will leave you with 9 grams of oil, not 10. Take this even higher to a 1000 ml or 1 litre batch (multiplying your recipe by 10) and you'll have 90 grams of oil instead of 100! This can throw your emulsification out of whack and will deprive you of 10 grams of lovely oil!

How do we use this information to figure out the volume of our recipes? Figure that something that is loaded with water - this min-maxed toner, for instance - is going to be close to 100 ml for a 100 gram recipe thanks to the high level of water and other liquid ingredients that are close to water and very few powdered ingredients. If you take a look at this leave in conditioner - is going to be close to 100 ml for a 100 gram recipe because most of the ingredients are around the same specific gravity as water. If you take a look at this body butter, you can see there's about 60% stuff that is around the specific gravity of water, and about 40% stuff that isn't. As a rough estimate, when making this product I would guess that a 100 gram batch will get me 60 to 70 grams of product. If I wanted to make a 4 ounce/120 ml jar, I'd make 200 grams of product and accept that I'd have a little left over. (This is why I buy small jars, so there's no waste! They also make awesome stocking stuffers or random gifts!) When you get into trying to figure the volume of anhydrous products, it's really hard to figure out how to translate the weight to volume!

When all is said and done, it is really just simpler to make the product and measure the volume for future reference. Make more than you think you'll need if you're making a big batch for a special occasion and store the extra in your finished products box for future enjoyment.

If you don't have a storage area for all your finished products, get one! It's fantastic to go into the box and find extra shampoo bars, conditioner bars, and everything else that you can use or give to people as gifts or as examples of your awesomeness!

Related posts:
Weight vs. volume

Friday, March 9, 2012

Question: What's the difference between moisturizing and hydrating?

What's the difference between moisturizing our skin and hydrating it? Are these fancy marketing terms or is there some difference between the two concepts? Let's review what we need for a moisturizing product...

Occlusives create a hydrophobic (water hating) barrier to reduce water loss from the skin, creating a barrier to reduce transepidermal water loss (or TEWL). There are three approved barrier ingredients recognized by the FDA - dimethicone, cocoa butter, and allantoin. There are other ingredients that can be occlusive, like our butters, oils, and esters, but they aren't approved barrier ingredients.

Emollients, which include oils, butters, and esters, "enhance the flexibility and smoothness of skin and provide a secondary soothing effect to the skin and mucous membranes" (Cosmetic Dermatology: Practices and Procedures).

Humectants attract and hold moisture, facilitating hydration. Hydration is defined as an adequate measure of water in our skin - anywhere between 20% to 30% in our stratum corneum, or top layer of skin. (There seems to be a debate about how much moisture should be in our stratum corneum. So far the lowest amount I've seen has been 10%, but most papers are saying around 20%, so I'll go with the majority here.)

Let's recap: Humectants draw water from the atmosphere and bind it, and the occlusives keep the water from the lotion or the atmosphere trapped in your skin by creating a barrier. The emollients make our skin feel nice and smooth. Ideally we combine all three to create an awesome product that draws water to your skin, traps it in, and makes our skin feel smooth and elastic.

The job of a moisturizer is to prevent transepidermal water loss, "which facilitates the body's own barrier repair mechanisms" (Lippincott's Primary Care Dermatology, p. 30). In other words, we use a moisturizer to take the place of our skin's barrier mechanisms while they repair themselves. We can add things that might help speed up this process - for instance, using something like evening primrose oil or borage oil, both of which are high in GLA, or sunflower, soybean, or rice bran oil, all of which are high in linoleic acid, and various additives - but the whole goal is to great a barrier between our skin and the world so we don't lose more moisture.

What kinds of products could be considered moisturizers? Anything that creates the barrier between our skin and the world. Slather on some mineral oil or olive oil and you've created that barrier. A fancy lotion with all kinds of extracts and exotic oils creates that barrier. A lotion bar, a whipped butter, a balm, a lotion, a cream, a body butter, a creme, and so on - anything that creates a barrier between you and the world counts as a moisturizer. You don't necessarily need to have an emollient or oil in the product, which means my min-maxed toner containing 0.5% allantoin could be considered a moisturizer because it creates that barrier between my face and the very chapping wind!

If we can make a moisturizer by slathering 100% mineral oil all over our skin, what's the point of making an exotic lotion filled with fancy ingredients like evening primrose oil, green tea extract, aloe vera and lavender hydrosol, shea butter, and sodium PCA lotion? Because creating a moisturizing product isn't just about creating a barrier. We can include ingredients for their benefits, like smoothing our skin, making it feel more flexible, speeding up barrier repair, reducing inflammation, and so on. Something like evening primrose oil is filled with gamma-linoleic acid, which can behave as an anti-inflammatory and barrier repair helper, as well as phytosterols, polyphenols, vitamins, minerals, and other things good for your skin. Green tea extract contains polyphenols and anti-oxidants. Aloe vera can offer soothing to damages skin, and lavender hydrosol might help soothe wind chapped or sunburned skin. Shea butter creates a nice barrier, but it also includes fatty acids that soften our skin, and sodium PCA is a great humectant that draws water to our skin.

On a final note, what's the difference between moisturizing and hydrating? Moisturizing is about creating an occlusive barrier to keep the water we have in our skin in our skin and preventing transepidermal water loss. Hydrating is about binding water to something like a humectant and keeping it on our skin. The ideal way to do this is to create an awesome product with humectants, proteins, or other moisture binding ingredient with an occlusive ingredient and some great emollients!

As an aside, if you have really dry skin and wonder why that lotion bar isn't helping your skin get any less dry, it's because you aren't adding any moisture to the equation. The lotion bar or whipped butter or balm is creating an occlusive barrier so you don't lose any more water, but it isn't adding moisture to your skin. To resolve this problem, apply the anhydrous product over damp skin to create a layer of moisture upon which you can apply your product!

Related posts:
Humectants
Occlusion
Emollients (a whole section of the blog)
Chemistry of our skin: An updated overview

Related reading:
Skin hydration: A review on its molecular mechanisms (great paper!)
Glycerin and the skin (another great paper!)

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Review: Measuring in percentages, converting to weight

I thought I'd bring this up again as I've had a few questions about this topic this week!  

You'll note that just about every recipe on this blog is measured in percentages that convert into weight. This is because it's more accurate than measuring 1 spoonful of this or 5 ml of that ingredient, which means that we can ensure we have the right amount of everything in our products. If we use a teaspoon of emulsifier, something that comes in pellet form oftentimes, we might be using a heaping teaspoon this time and a scant teaspoon next time, and that might throw the recipe out of whack.

To convert something to weight, just remove the % sign and replace it with the word "grams" and you'll have a recipe that will make 100 grams of something. If you want a 500 gram batch, then multiply everything by 5. If you want an 800 gram batch, then multiply everything by 8. If you want a 200 gram batch, multiply everything by 2. And so on.

If you must do everything in weighed ounces, this gets a little trickier. I would convert the % sign into ounces, then make everything into a decimal, otherwise you're going to get 100 ounces of stuff, which is a lot! For instance 6% emulsifier, would become 0.6 ounces emulsifier, 10% oil would become 1.0 ounces of oil, and so on. It'll make up about a 10 ounces by weight batch of product.

Want more helpful hints? Look to your right to the frequently asked questions section for many many more! 

Related posts:
How to convert to weight from percentages?
Weight vs. volume
How to calculate percentages

Why is everyone so concerned about build up of products on hair?

It seems that every hair based community I visit and all the blogs touting the no shampoo, baking soda, or conditioner washing programs talk about avoiding build up...but what exactly is build up?

Some of this is originally from this post on build up from May 22, 2010...
Build-up doesn't have a specific definition, but it's understood to be when our hair has a sticky, gummy, or coated feeling. It is also generally understood to take more than one usage of the ingredient or product to cause build-up, although it can happen (theoretically) with one washing. Anything that is substantive to our hair has the potential to cause build-up - which is why we use them - meaning cationic quaternary compounds (like BTMS or cetrimonium bromide), silicones (like dimethicone and amodimethicone), and cationic polymers (like polyquat 7 or honeyquat)

What causes build-up? Some ingredients we use can cause build-up, and this isn't helped by the water we use to bathe. One of the main culprits in the feeling of build-up is calcium in our water. It can make hair feel dull and rough. This is one of the reasons we see EDTA in commercial shampoo: EDTA is a chelating ingredient that binds to ions in hard water (sodium, calcium, and other metallic elements) and keeps it from depositing on our hair and scalp. We can include EDTA in our shampoo at up to 0.20%.

Cationic quaternary compounds like BTMS or cetrimonium bromide can potentially leave build-up on our hair if we are using too much, for instance, using intense conditioners as every day or leave in conditioners, and this is increased by the usage of fatty alcohols, like cetyl alcohol or cetearyl alcohol, in said conditioners as they can increase substantivity and conditioning (note: substantivity and conditioning are good things that can be bad if they lead to build up).

We use cationic quaternary compounds because they offer conditioning properties - reduced friction, static, and impact of combing forces, and improved lubricity. The problem arises when we can't remove the conditioner from our hair when we wash it, generally because we aren't using a well formulated, mild, surfactant based cleanser.

Cationic polymers can build up on our hair over time, but if we use a good surfactant based cleanser, they'll be rinsed out during the next washing. If we're using the cationic polymers in a shampoo, they can form a negatively charged complex with excess surfactant that will resist removal. This is one of the reasons we use the surfactant levels we do in a conditioning shampoo - too much excess surfactant can cause this problem - and the reason we don't use a ton of cationic polymers! This negatively charged complex increases with SLS, for some reason, which is another reason to formulate with more gentle surfactants. (Polyquats 6, 7, 10, 11, and 16 are more likely to resist removal than the other polyquats.)

Silicones can build up on your hair if you are using a lot of it in a few different products. The worst culprit is amodimethicone as it is more substantive to your hair than dimethicone or cyclomethicone. Using 2% dimethicone in a shampoo, then 2% in a conditioner is unlikely to cause build-up, and you really have to be using a lot to get any sort of true build-up from silicones. (And remember, 2% cetrimonium chloride gets rid of silicones - even a lot of them!)

This is a pretty important aside - you cannot get build up if you aren't using a product. For instance, let's say I use 5 grams of my anti-frizz spray on Monday. I have 100 grams of product, and 20 grams of this is dimethicone. Using 5% of this product means I get 1 gram of dimethicone on my hair. If we tested my hair on Tuesday, you'd see I have slightly less than 1 gram of dimethicone on my hair. If you tested my hair on Wednesday, you'd see that I have less than 1 gram of dimethicone on my hair strands. If I don't wash my hair or put any extra products on it, I will never have more than the original 1 gram of dimethicone in my hair. Walking around, going to work, teaching craft groups, eating food, and so on will not make me have more than 1 gram of dimethicone in my hair. The only way to get more dimethicone in my hair is to add it to my hair via a product. The dimethicone can't replicate on its own and cause more build up on my hair! So you aren't going to get build up over time unless you use a product containing an ingredient that could potentially build up on your hair.

The more damaged your hair, the more potential build-up of the conditioning agents - damaged hair has a higher negative charge, and we know the more negatively charged your hair, the more conditioner is deposited. You want more deposition, but you also need to remove the conditioning agents when cleansing your hair the next time. If you're using intense conditioners or tons of styling products regularly, make sure you also use a clarifying shampoo (no conditioning agents or silicone) and include some cetrimonium chloride in your creations!

A final aside...I recognize that my personal experiences don't constitute data, but I have been using conditioner with at least 7% BTMS-50, 2% cationic polymer, and 2% dimethicone; a leave in conditioner with at least 2% BTMS-50, 1% Incroquat CR, and 2% dimethicone; and an anti-frizz spray with 10% dimethicone for the past six years. I have never seen anything on my hair that remotely resembles the definition of build up. My friends and family all use my products and not one of them reports that they are suffering from build up on their hair. (My mom and best friend use a lot of silicone based styling products, too.) My products have much higher levels of conditioning agents, cationic polymers, and silicones than store bought products, and you would think that we'd all be experiencing build up, especially in a town with hard water, but nope, none. Build up really isn't as common a phenomenon as people would have you think...

Related posts: