New conditioner experiment

The couple of ingredients I ordered from the States arrived a few days ago so I was all excited to try the new conditioner ingredient I got. It was the reason I sucked it up and put in a cross-border order; stearamidopropyl dimethylamine doesn't seem to be available at any Canadian suppliers, BMTS-25, BMTS-50, and cetrimonium chloride are, but not the one that is in my most favouritest, and of course discontinued, conditioner.

The conditioner I'm referring to is the old version of Herbal Essences Totally Twisted conditioner, the one with "lavender and jade extracts", not this "berry twist" business they now sell under the same label. The two are not even close to the same product; the old one used stearamidopropyl dimethylamine as the conditioner, and the new one uses BTMS... it's a pretty fundamental difference. I mean, I don't hate the new one, it at least doesn't contain the film-forming cationic polymers I dread, but I really liked the old one.

Stearamidopropyl dimethylamine is kind of distinct as far as easily-available conditioning ingredients go, in its ability to remove build up of silicones and cationic film-formers, and in that respect it's outstanding for fine hair like mine. I think this ingredient is why I loved the old conditioner formula so much, it just left my hair feeling so light but also not static-y (SD does that too, a wonder product!).

Anyway, the ingredients of the old version are as follows: Water; Stearyl Alcohol; Cyclopentasiloxane; Cetyl Alcohol; Stearamidopropyl Dimethylamine; Dimethicone; Lavandula Angustifolia (Lavender) Flower/Leaf Stem Extract; Jade Plant (Crassula Argentea) Extract; Fragrance; Glutamic Acid; Benzyl Alcohol; EDTA; Methylchloroisothiazolinone; Methylisothiazolinone; Citric Acid; Ext Violet 2. Thank goodness for the internet and its vast repository of obsolete information! :D

As far as ingredient lists go, this one is not overly complex, and I now have the ingredients to more-or-less recreate it. Water, is of course the easiest; I buy my distilled water from the grocery store. Stearyl alcohol is next; this I only have as part of cetearyl alcohol (50/50 mix), but that is fine because two ingredients down the list is cetyl alcohol, the other half of what makes up cetearyl; so I just used cetearyl alcohol to replace both the stearyl and cetyl. Next is cyclopentasiloxane, also known as cyclomethicone, have that. Stearamidopropyl dimethylamine, now I have that too! Dimethicone, have that. Lavender and jade plant extracts; I have lavender essential oil and nothing made of jade plant, but I'm pretty sure they are just there for label appeal and to justify the naming of the product; I could put in lavender, but I didn't because I wanted it to smell like rhubarb. Fragrance, rhubarb, obviously! Glutamic acid is a single amino acid, I don't have that, but I do have silk amino acid, so I used those instead. Benzyl alcohol, methylchloroisothiazolinone, and methylisothiazolinone are all preservatives, I substituted what I have, Optiphen Plus in this case. EDTA is a chealating agent, I have disodium EDTA, so I used that. Citric acid is used to adjust pH, I have that. And violet 2 is the dye; I used the same red one I used for my rhubarb shampoo.

The process I followed for making the conditioner was adapted from a sample formula found on Making Cosmetics for a conditioner containing stearamidopropyl dimethylamine. I basically just used it to figure out which phase to put the SD in. By the way, I'm not sponsored by any company (free ingredients? I wish!), so if I mention a company it's because I have ordered from them, because I like/want/think you might want to know about a product they sell, or, like in this case, because they have a resource that I've found useful. I've ordered from Making Cosmetics a few times and they seem decent, but I didn't order my SD from them that I used in this conditioner.

So I put the SD in the water phase (A)... along with the water, and the cetearyl alcohol went by itself in the oil phase (B). Everything else was left for the cool-down phase. A and B went into the double boiler. The melting of the SD was kind of weird, it didn't exactly dissolve in the water, at first it floated like an oil. I tested the pH of the water phase and it was crazy-high. I had to add quite a lot of citric acid to bring it down to 5. Once the pH was at 5, I gave it a stir and the SD seemed to solubilize into the water. I think what happened was that the SD and the citric acid reacted together to create a salt, which is what is supposed to happen. Anyway, I went ahead and made the recipe I had planned out based on the expected usage rates of the ingredients in the Totally Twisted ingredients list.

When I mixed the oil and water phases, it looked good and thickened up nicely as it cooled. The problems started when I added the cool-down ingredients. I added the disodium EDTA first, separately from the rest of the cool-down ingredients, and gave it a bit of a mix before pouring in the rest of the additives. Once the cool-down ingredients were in and I started mixing, the conditioner thinned drastically. I thought it might thicken up gradually, as I have had other conditioners do that in the past. It didn't.

The following day it was still runny. I tested the pH again to make sure it wasn't crazy, since I had added so much citric acid the day before. It was really low, like, 2. So I added some sodium hydroxide to bring it back up to my intended pH of 5. As I did that, it looked like it was thickening up, however when it mixed it with my milk frother it looked more like it might be curdling. I bottled it up and let it sit for a while.

Dun dun dunnnn... It separated! My first broken emulsion! I feel like it was such a haphazard construction of this product that I'm not really overly surprised. I also feel kind of like this might be a rite of passage in learning to formulate.

I have also learned that the supplier I bought my SD from says it is oil soluble, and to put it in the oil phase... so maybe that was part of the problem. I also used Optiphen Plus, and I don't know if this applies to the "Plus" version, but regular Optiphen is supposedly notorious for breaking emulsions.


Anyway, I'll try this one again soon.