With my last experiment a failure, I decided to go back to a recipe created by someone else. I thought I'd totally change course and try a surfactant product. After some research, I decided to make a shampoo based on Susan Barclay-Nichols' daily-use shampoo. I shampoo my hair pretty much every day because it is really oily - and looks it - because it is also fine, and I mean super, baby-fine. I thought a gentler, lower surfactant recipe sounded good because I do wash my hair so often and it is prone to breakage and crunchy, splitting ends; no use exacerbating those problems.
<anecdote>I actually discovered Susan's blog while researching hair products. Some commercial shampoo and conditioner I was using had recently reformulated recipes, and I found the changes left my hair feeling waxy, coated, sticky, and gross after using, in addition to getting greasy way faster, (having been pretty nice products before,) and I was trying to figure out what ingredients were causing the grossness. Turns out it was the polyquaterniums, which are film-forming, cationic conditioning agents. My hair hates them. It doesn't seem to matter which one it is, I've tried 76, 10, 7, 34(?) and likely a bunch of others, and I've come to the conclusion that I just have to avoid them in hair products. I like them in body wash though, and lots of people love them as conditioners. So needless to say, I left the polyquats out of the shampoo recipe I made.</anecdote>
Here are the tweaks I made to the recipe:
Surfactant phase
water = water
anionic surfactant = sodium laureth sulfate (an anionic surfactant)
cocamidopropyl betaine = cocamidopropyl betaine (an amphoteric surfactant)
polyquat 7 or honeyquat = left the heck out!
glycerin = glycerin
hydrolyzed protein = hydrolyzed oat protein
aloe vera = water (don't have any aloe)
= glycol distearate (thickener, moisturizer, pearlizer/opacifier)
Additive phase
dimethicone = dimethicone and cyclomethicone (my hair loves silicones)
panthenol = panthenol
preservative = preservative
fragrance oil or essential oil = fragrance oil
So not too many changes. Just left out the polyquats, subbed water for the aloe, added cyclomethicone, and added the glycol distearate.
My surfactant phase went into my favourite 3-spouted beaker and into a double boiler. Which was way. too. hot. My beaker made a "pop" noise and all my ingredients were in the pot of boiling water with pieces of beaker. Oops. I now start my double boiler from room temperature with beakers already in, it seems even Pyrex can't handle those kind of temperature changes.
I tried again with a different measuring cup, accidentally adding an extra 5% water, but went ahead anyway. I heated the surfactant phase until the glycol distearate had melted, gave it a little stir, and took it out to cool. I was impatient, so I put it in a cold water bath. Lo and behold, there came to be bits of white grainy stuff in my shampoo. The glycol distearate was solidifying and coming out of solution! I heated it again until it was melted and homogeneous and took it off the heat, letting it cool naturally this time. And again, white grainy bits. Back it went, onto the heat a third time. This time once the GD was melted, I mixed it with my milk frother. I had hoped to avoid using it so I wouldn't foam up the shampoo, but it was a last resort. This time it stayed mixed as it cooled!
Once it was cooled I added the additives, increasing the preservative a bit to compensate for the extra water. It was runny. Even after 24 hours it was runny. I added 7% more SLeS and a bit more preservative. It was still runny. I tried adding 3% salt to thicken it according to the salt curve. It thickened. A lot. Into a kind of gelatinous lump. Whatever, it was fine, it was usable.
When I used it I liked it even less. It made no lather and I had to use piles of it to get my hair feeling clean-ish, though it did get my hair clean-ish. 48 hours later it was liquid again.
So, I think I added too much (3%) glycol distearate, as too much suppresses foam, and there was none whatsoever. I also think that maybe the concentration of surfactants just wasn't high enough for the salt curve to work, but I'm less sure about that. Anyway, it smelled nice, but most of it ended up getting dumped out. Good thing I make small batches.
Also, it turns out my favourite beaker wasn't antique, irreplaceable lab-ware; they are available at Canadian Tire, where my mom got me a new one. :D
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