The home of SwiftCraftyMonkey Formulating Inc.! Join Susan as she obsesses about cosmetic chemistry and other things (some possibly related to monkeys). Often strange, occasionally useful, and always worth a stop as a point of interest on your journey through the Intertron.
There are many things we can call emulsifiers for our products, but when you’re making a lotion or other emulsified product, what you probably want is an emulsification system, which generally consists of at least two ingredients – a low HLB emulsifier like glycol distearate or glycol stearate and a high HLB emulsifier like ceteareth-20...
I was surfing around various forums yesterday morning while taking a break from the annoyance that was putting the tutorial for the cosmetic bag together (I really hate Microsoft products! Stop thinking for me!!!), and the number one question I saw over and over again was this – why did my lotion fail? Let’s take...
I’ve been using glycol distearate (HLB 1) and ceteareth-20 (HLB 15.2) as my emulsifiers for these HLB posts, but you can use any combination you wish as long as you have a low HLB emlusifier and an high HLB emulsifier in the mix. Here’s what I have in my workshop right now: glycol distearate –...
Melian poses some very interesting questions in this post, and I thought they needed to be answered here! Bear with me as this is a really long post (not that I’m the Queen of Succint-land on normal days, but this one seems really long!) I’m finding disagreements on the hlb of a few oils. how...
Let’s take one last look at the HLB system for making our own emulsifiers before we return to duplicating products. Remember that if you make a change to any of the oil soluble ingredients you’ll need to re-calculate your emulsifier! If you’re going from one vegetable oil to another – soy bean oil to sunflower...