theory – Page 2 – It's all in my hands

Formulating a lotion: Choosing the fats – THEORY pt.5

[Actually the title of this post should be CHOOSING THE FATS / THE SECRET OF THE GREASE-FALL!] 🙂

You have learnt which percentage of fats your cream should approximately have, according to what kind of lotion you want to create; now it is time to learn how to distribute the fats within the percentage you have chosen.

The choice of the fats and their percentage in the formula is of big importance because mostly from them depends the touch of the cream: the more you know about them, the better you will be able to formulate. But let me explain how 😉

I will talk firstly about the OILS, and later on I will briefly talk about butters and waxes.
When talking about oils (but this goes also for other fats) you do not want to look much at their so-called “miraculous” properties (I won’t repeat this often enough!); what you want to look at, instead, are their technical qualities:
– density,
– spreading ability,
– feeling on the skin/absorbing ability of the skin.

– fatty acids composition.

[Note: on the internet you can find slightly different data from what I am reporting here: mine is my personal sum up and what I believe to be the most correct data. You are free to make a research on your own and give more value to different data you find 🙂 ]

Density – tells us, surprise surprise, how dense an oil is. For example castor oil (dens. 0.96) is one of the most dense oils, while jojoba oil (to be very precise it is not actually an oil, it is an ester… but let’s think of it as an oil for now 🙂 ) is one of the least dense (dens. 0.869).
Spreading Ability – this concerns how the oils spread on the skin. Don’t be mistaken however thinking that the spreading ability will tell you which oil has a light impact on the skin: an oil can spread very lightly and, at the same time, give a greasy touch. How? Well, the spreading ability tells you how the oil, when spreading it on the skin, is going to feel like: if an oil is very dense it will feel like you hardly manage to spread it, a medium oil will spread quite nicely and leave quite a good feeling in the end, while a light oil will most likely spread very fast and, at some point, you will feel as if it actually disappeared (don’t be mistaken by this: very light oils are very likely to, after 5 or 10 minutes, appear again on your skin leaving you with a greasy face 🙂 ). Now I will give you some data examples: wheat germ oil is DD (very dense) which means it doesn’t spread much but it is quite a “thick” oil; peanut oil is classified as D (dense), meaning that it doesn’t spread very easily; olive oil is classified MD (medium density); Almond oil is classified as M (medium spreading ability); Borage oil is Fl-M (fluid-medium: spreads a little bit better than a medium oil); primrose oil, instead, is classified as Fl (light-fluid) and sunflower oil, eventually, is classified L (light).
Absorbing ability on the skin – As I was just pointing out, some oils “show back” on the skin even if in the beginning they spread so well that you thought they had disappeared 🙂 what we really need to know, in terms of what is going to show on the skin, is how do these oil absorb on the skin. I will bring some examples again: wheat germ oil – greasy; borage oil – a little greasy; macadamia nut oil – oily feeling; almond oil – oily feeling; olive oil – oily feeling; argan oil – medium; jojoba oil – good absorption; sunflower oil – good absorption.
[These factors can be said also about synthetic oils.]

Fatty Acid Composition deserves a bigger discourse and it is not too important for the explanation of the GREASE-FALL, so it has its separate post.

Now finally… THE GREASE-FALL 🙂

You have learnt that oils and butters are different in composition and in how they behave on the skin. But how to use this information when we have to formulate?
Well, imagine you have a rather oily face and you want to create a cream for it. You want a light cream, easy to spread and absorb… and you don’t want it to make your skin greasy at all. If you didn’t read what I just said about the spreading ability I am sure you would think “I will make a cream with light density oils!”.
Well… and that would be SO WRONG! 🙂 The cream would spread even too easily, it would feel fresh in the beginning but after 5 minutes you would be all oily once again.
And imagine you have a very dry skin and you would like to have a very rich cream: probably you are thinking to make it only with fats like, let’s say, shea butter… am I wrong? It’s a rich butter, it has high vitamin E content… nothing could be better than that.
Well… WRONG AGAIN 🙂 you would get a cream which is not nice to spread, leaves your skin white unless you try to spread it nicely and you wouldn’t feel hydrated as you wish.
So what is going wrong?
Well, it’s very simple said: you are not formulating a GREASE-FALL, you are just adding oils randomly! 😀

So what is this bloody GREASE-FALL RULE:
whenever you start formulating a cream and you are clear which purpose you want it to have, you have to balance the different kinds of fats! Every cream, to be a good cream, need all the kinds of fats!
So how to differentiate a light cream from a thick cream for dry skin?
This is the magic of the grease-fall rule. 🙂 The idea of using shea butter for dry skin is not bad, but you will have to add also all the other densities; let me show you an example:
let’s say our dry-skin cream will have a percentage of 12% fats, you can organize the fats like this:
1% beeswax (for example, very high in density and low spreading ability. Gives richness to the cream. Never exceed with waxes though)
6% shea butter (you could also do 2% mango butter and 4% shea butter… the point is to keep butters at 6% because they are more emollient than most oils)
3% argan oil (medium to rich oil)
1% borage oil (medium)
1% jojoba oil (very light)
This is just an example which I “invented” exactly now and I am sure I could do better but, once you get the grip of it, you will love changing and experimenting on your own, so don’t give too much importance to this; it is just to give you an idea of how to create a balanced grease-fall: you put the highest amount of what you need and then, like in a rough gaussian distribution, you add everything else in minor amount.
So here is an example of a grease-fall for oily skin:
let’s say we will make a cream of 5% fats (with 5% it is not easy to make a good grease-fall and it is also quite hard to tell the difference in a cream 🙂 but we try to be professional no matter what 🙂 ok? )
2% jojoba oil (or, if you want to use synthetic oils, there are some which are much lighter than jojoba oil: for example dicaprylyl ether. Always bear in mind that even if they are very light, if you use too much, they will show up again on the skin)
1.5% sunflower oil (light)
1% black currant oil (medium-light)
0.5% shea butter
As you can see the shea butter is extremely low in % but still it will help the cream to be more balanced in the end 🙂

I hope I managed to be clear enough about this matter because it is an important one! 🙂
Let me know if you have any questions! 🙂

Formulating a lotion: Phase B – THEORY pt.4

The Phase B is the “oily phase” or the “heated oily phase”.
It contains the emulsifier or the emulsifiers if they are two, the thickeners (if needed) and all the oils and fats which do not get negatively affected by heat (this because 90% of the times the Phase B is heated up to 70°C).

– EMULSIFIERS:
There are many kinds of emulsifiers. I will create a dedicated post about them. The main difference regard to the formulation of a lotion/cream is that some need to be heated up to 70°C and others don’t need it. The highest number, however, need to be heated to create a stable emulsion; this is why the Phase B is called also the “heated oily phase”: because most of the time it is heated.

– THICKENERS:
Thickeners are those ingredients which give consistency to the cream and also help keeping the emulsion stable; the most common are cetyl alcohol, stearic acid, cetylstearic acid). Some are even slight emulsifiers themselves (for example cetyl alcohol which is a lipophilic emulsifier: it means that it is “fat-loving” emulsifier which can emulsify a small small quantity of water into a large quantity of fat).
Thickeners are solid (usually they are in pearls) and need to be heated in order to melt with the other ingredients.
In a formula you should add around 1% of thickeners and you can choose to add only one kind or two kinds. I personally like the combination of 0.5% cetyl alcohol and 0.5% cetearyl palmitate. You should do experiments to find out which consistency each thickener gives to a cream, in order to be able to choose what you like the most. 🙂
Pay attention, however, that while most of the emulsifiers do not contain thickeners in their formula, some do. It is the case, for example, of Montanov 68 (this is one of its commercial names) which is: “cetearyl alcohol, cetearyl glucoside”, where the cetearyl alcohol is our co-emulsifier and thickener, the cetearyl glucoside is the emulsifier. In this case you should not add any extra thickener to your cream-formula or it would result in a very lumpy cream difficult to spread.

– THE FAT (finally) 🙂 :
Before you start formulating a lotion you obviously need to know what is going to be its purpose: is it a cream for body, face or feet/hands? And, if it is for face, is it for normal skin, dry skin or oily skin?
Once you know what kind of cream you are planning to do, then you can start formulating.
Here is a short guideline on the percentage of fats you should add to your cream according to its purpose.
Keeping in mind that in any cream the fats should never go over the 25% fats (I am talking about O/W creams, about W/O it’s a different story but that will require another post) these are the values:
0-2% – it is obviously not a lotion but it is a gel: good for oily skin in summer days.
2-4.5% – this could be considered a oil-free lotion because the percentage of fats is so low. Good for oily skin.
4.5-7.5% – good for a cream for oily skin in winter days or normal skin in summer.
8-12% – good for normal skin
12-15% – good for dry skin
15% – light body cream
20% – medium weight body cream
25% – good for a rather thick body cream, hand cream and foot cream!
All these values can be changed a bit, according to what is your purpose: they are not fixed values but they give the idea 🙂

How to decide which oils and butters should go in your lotion?
On the market there are tons and tons of oils and buttes, some are natural, nowadays it is fashionable to use exotic oils 🙂 and some are synthetic.
Probably the first thing you would do is to add any kind of oil which sounds good to you: “Oh I read somewhere that the oil of khtululu (I invented this plant 🙂 I am just trying to make a point) is very good against skin-aging, it has miraculous antioxidant properties and, if used everyday, it will also prepare the breakfast for you in the morning!!! I will make a cream with 7% fats using 5% this oil and 2% turururu oil, which is a very rare, I will just sell my kidney to have it but you see it is found only on the Everest peak in 100 ml jars and it is said to be marvelous for firming the skin…”
Let me say NO NO NO NO NO and NOOO 😀
There is one thing that you will happily or sadly learn while learning to make lotion-creams: nothing is miraculous and it is not true that the more one thing costs, the more it is effective. That is just what market wants us to believe. 🙂 And, if you study well enough (even on your own, doing some research), you will realize that most of the times we are just being fooled 🙂 .

There are some rules which need your attention when deciding which fats to add in your formula and these rules concern the density, viscosity, spreading ability of your oil more than the so-called miraculous properties. I will never repeat this too many times.

So the new post will be only about the oils and how to formulate a group of oils in the cream, how to choose them, what to look for and so on 😀

(Sources)

How to make a lotion – THEORY pt.2

HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE A LOTION/CREAM?

As explained in the “Theory pt.1” post a cream is made of water and oils kept together by emulsifiers (one or more in the same formulation).
So, when you attempt to actually make a cream, you have to start preparing the ingredients separately. There will be at least:

PHASE A: the water based ingredients
PHASE B: the oily ingredients (or oil soluble ingredients)

I think it is better to actually show a very basic recipe of a cream so you can understand what I am talking about.
Every recipe is made for 100 grams of product and every number written after the ingredient indicates the grams (“water to 100” means that the water will be enough to make the recipe reach the 100 gr value)

BASIC BODY CREAM:
Phase A:
water (demineralized) to 100
glycerin 4
xanthan gum 0.3
Phase B:
fats 15
emulsifier 3 (imagine I have chosen one which need to be heated)
thickener 2

Phase C:
Active ingredients 5
Preservative 0.6
2 drops fragrance oil or essential oil

So what does it mean to “make a phase A and a phase B”?
Once you have the recipe you start weighting the ingredients and you cannot put them all together like an unknown mixture: there are rules to be followed and the most important rule is to keep the two phases separated in the beginning.
So you will need at least two bechers and in one you will add the phase A, in the other you will add the phase B.

The PHASE A usually contains water, glycerin, one or more jelling agents (mainly: xanthan gum, different kinds of carbomer or hydroxyethyl cellulose) which help the emulsion to keep stable and they give consistency to the cream. There are different kinds of jelling agents and each gives a final texture to the cream.

The PHASE B instead contains the oily ingredients and the emulsifier, the thickeners if needed and so on. I have not been specific in this recipe neither for the fats nor for the emulsifiers; this because too much must be said about these two subjects and I will make other posts about this.
What we will consider, however, is that the emulsifier in this cream is one of those which have to be heated at 70°C to actually emulsify water and fats.

So, in this case, now that we have the phase A and the phase B we need to heat them up to 70°C (measuring the temperature is important).

Once they have both reached the same temperature, you need to add the Phase B to the Phase A (never otherwise) and you have to start mixing them possibly with an immersion mixer (pay attention at this point: avoid incorporating air or it will result in bubbles inside your cream). Notice that when you pour the Phase B into the Phase A you should actually pour it little by little, mix, add some more, mix, add some more… this will give better results! 😀

Once the liquid (it should still be quite liquid at this point) looks emulsified you have to keep stirring with a spoon until it cools down completely.
When it is cooled down (you will notice that now it looks more like a real cream because it has become thick and creamy 🙂 )

this is the time you can add your PHASE C: the preservative, the active ingredients (the ingredients which are extremely good for your skin) and, if you wish to, two drops of your favourite fragrance oils or essential oils (bear in mind that if you want to add fragrance oils they need to be of cosmetic grade: not any fragrance oil will do).

If it sounded very easy… well it is not really 🙂
I’m not trying to take the motivation away from you, but it is not easy to get a stable emulsified cream; sometimes it gets bubbles inside, sometimes it separates after few days (usually if there are many bubbles it means it is not really emulsified… but I will teach you a trick to get to know if it is emulsified or not). Sometimes things go wrong and you don’t even manage to know why.
So I would suggest that you start reading more and more about how to make creams, also from other websites (I am just summing it up, here… but there are many websites which helped me in learning this wonderful thing so I am sure you can find them interesting also!).
There are so many things to be said about this wonderful subject! 🙂
I feel I forgot to say so much, but I will try to add everything I can to this blog.
Anyway if you decide to study about making creams… ALL THE BEST! 😉 You won’t be left unsatisfied 😀

For various recipes click HERE
To learn how to formulate cosmetics click HERE
For a list of online cosmetic ingredients suppliers click HERE

How to make a lotion – THEORY pt.1

Hello! 🙂

Escin and Caffeine Eye Cream14

Right after posting the body-butter recipe I realized it was not good enough and so I started studying and studying how face and body creams are really made.

I have decided to make short posts to explain also to anybody who would like to learn, how they are done in real.

The subject is not the easiest thing, it needs a lot of studying and understanding but I will try to make things as simple as they can be 🙂

A very basic lotion is made of:
– water,

– oils/butters,

– emulsifier,

– preservative.

[Of course there are much more ingredients that can be added (like active ingredients or thickeners, for example), but I am starting from the basics so learn step by step and everything will be clear! 🙂 ]

Water and oils together give hydration (the water obviously is hydrating, but the oils or butters help the water to not evaporate… plus they give nutriments to the skin; but I will talk about this further on), the emulsifier keeps the water and the oils together 🙂 otherwise they would separate and that wouldn’t be anymore a cream (plus studies says that a cream, read “emulsified water and fats”, hydrate more than separated water and oils; which means that if you shake water and fats together and use them as a cream it will not hydrate you as much as if you made an actual cream with the same ingredients 😉 ).
At last the preservative saves the cream from the proliferation of dangerous bacteria (anytime you use water in something you produce by yourself, you need to use a preservative or you need to save your product in the fridge and use it in a few days only). I don’t know why but people dislike “preservatives” as if they were a terrible thing. They are not: there are many kinds of preservatives, some are eco-friendly (which doesn’t mean that they are like “fresh water”) some are not at all… you can choose accordingly to this, but bear in mind that using a preservative in your products is not an option (if this can make you feel better usually the % of preservative, which changes according to which one you are using, is only around 0.5%).

But now back to the ingredients:

WATER
It must be “demineralized” microbiologically pure water, you should be able to find demineralized water in supermarkets as the water used for ironing. There is a post which explain better on this HERE.
You could also use different kinds of hydrolized flower waters (like rose water, witch hazel…), choosing according to their properties (but keep in mind that many times they are expensive and they don’t have really strong properties… they can be considered more “poetic” than effective, which means that they almost only “sound good” 🙂 ).

BUTTERS and OILS
I am going to make a separate post about the choice of oils and butters because there are definitely too many things to say.
In a cream you should not use just one kind of fat: oils and butters should be balanced and chosen accordingly to the kind of cream you want to make, the purpose it has, the touch you want it to have… it’s not a matter of so called “miraculous” properties (actually the more you will study “how to make a cream” the more you will realize that NOTHING IS MIRACULOUS… but maybe I should make another post about this also 🙂 ), it is a matter of viscosity, density, feeling at the touch, spreading ability.
To make it very short: there are some rules you have to follow in order to make a balanced “fall” of fats in your cream.

EMULSIFIERS
Also the emulsifiers will have their own post.
Emulsifiers can be very different from one another: some must be heated until 70°C to work, some cannot be heated at all or they don’t work (so according to this difference you will have to change how you make the cream… you will see how in a second!); some are for W/O (read “water in oils”) and some are O/W (read “oil in water”) [everything will be explained, don’t worry 🙂 ]; some give a dry feeling to the cream, some a rich, or a light, or a very smooth touch.
Nothing is left to “chance” and as you start experimenting you will be able to experience the difference from one another.

But now… HOW TO ACTUALLY MAKE A LOTION/CREAM?

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