Chemistry

In some recipes, you’ll see the addition of citric acid or sodium hydroxide (lye) at the end to alter the pH of the product. Ideally, our products will be between 4.5 and 7 (there are few products that fall outside these areas, like cold processed soap and some moisturizers with AHAs), and the citric acid...

Okay, so we know all about saponins – from yesterday’s post – so let’s take a look at sapogenins and how they differ. If you’ll recall from yesterday, a saponin contains two parts – the glycone, which is the sugar part, and the aglycone, which is the non-sugar part. When a saponin undergoes hydrolysis, the...

With all this talk about natural emulsifiers and surfactants, I thought we’d get into a little chemistry about sapogenins and saponins!  Saponins are steroid or triterpenoid glycosides that have amphiphilic or amphipathic features. They are grouped together by having “soap like foaming qualities they produce in aqueous solutions” – in other words, when you put...

So what the heck are terpenes? We see them mentioned a lot in information about essential oils, but what are they and do they benefit us as bath and body formulators in any way? Terpenes are organic compounds, the major building blocks within nearly every living creature. For instance, steroids are derivatives of the triterpene...