Damn you, humidity!

I made a bunch of terribly cute little bath bomb pumpkins to embed in bigger bath bombs, but the humidity has gotten to them and they look all fuzzy! Grr! I wonder if there is any way to pretty them up again. Maybe I'll just have to call the bombs "fuzzy pumpkin."

Lotion for a greasy face

Tonight I made an attempt at an item on my wish list, the lightweight moisturizer for my face. I decided to try out an emulsifier I got a little while ago but haven't used yet: Ritamulse SCG, aka glyceryl stearate (and) cetearyl alcohol (and) sodium stearoyl lactylate. Know your INCI names, people! I accidentally just ordered some more of this because I didn't remember the INCI! Thankfully the package I have and the package on the way are both smallish.

I wanted the oils to be minimal in this lotion, so I decided to put in only 1.5% tamanu oil, and I only caved and put that one in because I've had success using a lotion containing it to help get rid of post-acne hyper-pigmentation, which I've been having a fair bit of lately. Frankly, it smells bad, and it makes the lotion smell bad, but if it does what I want it to do I'll put up with it.

I included some cetyl alcohol for oil-free moisturizing and to add some structure to the lotion; I'll definitely reduce it by 1/3 or 1/2 if I make this again, because the lotion is super thick! I think the cetearyl alcohol that is part of the emulsifier probably thickens it up just fine.

I also went a bit crazy with the goodies. I included 5% niacinamide (because of which the lotion needed to have a pH of 6), some ceramide complex, allantoin, honeyquat (oops, Susan at Point of Interest recommends not using cationics with Ritamulse SCG, but it's just a tiny bit, and it looks thick and stable so far!), silk amino acids, and hyaluronic acid. You only get one face, best to look after it! ;)

Hopefully the niacinamide helps with my post-inflammatory hyper-pigmentation (PIH) a bit.

Anyway, it was a regular heat and hold process. I drizzled the water phase into the oil phase slowly while mixing (with an Ikea milk frother), per Susan's recommendation. It thickened right up almost instantly. I didn't have to mix for long since I was only making a 10 g test batch and it cooled really quickly. Once it was good and cool (also per Susan's instructions, to prevent horrible curdling), I added the cool-down ingredients and gave it another stir with the frother. It is so thick that even the frother doesn't whip air into it. I gobbed it into an airless pump container and it was ready to go!

I tried it out after having a shower and using my acne meds. It felt crazy thick and heavy going on, but after a few minutes it had, rather remarkably, settled down to a soft, somewhat powdery, and maybe very slightly waxy feel. It is really quite light once dry. It isn't the greatest spreader because it is thick and dries quickly; I didn't include any 'cones in it because I didn't know how they'd fare with this emulsifier, but I'll probably add some next time. I do love my silicones!

Overall, not too shabby.

Wish list

Sigh, I'm stuck in a poxy hotel room, working out of town again. All I can think about are the alchemy projects I'd rather be working on, so I have decided to make a wish list, mostly to remind myself when I'm sitting at home wondering what to do.

Shark Sauce - Have most of the ingredients and a few more are on the way. Just missing licorice extract, aloe vera juice, and normal molecular weight hyaluronic acid. Plan to leave out the oils, or substitute something I have/is super light because, y'know, grease-face and acne.

Dupe of the formerly AlphaHydrox 10% AHA Oil Free Formula (now known as Alpha Skin Care Essential Renewal Gel 10% AHA, with corresponding price increase). Need to figure out what gelling ingredient to use, bearing in mind pH stability and price. I'd like to be able to factor in the feel, but seeing as I've only ever used natural gums before, that's probably not gonna happen.

A nice, light facial moisturizer, for when I run out of the Spectro Daily Facial Moisturizer for Blemish-prone Skin that I'm currently using in the evenings after my retinoid... maybe Shark Sauce can replace this. It should be moisturizing.

About a bajillion little tubs of reredux body butter for xmas presents.

A gentle, creamy facial cleanser that is nice, and works for my crappy skin, and is nothing like this.

Maybe some kind of a booster to apply with my sunscreen, since there is rarely anything good in them aside from the sun-protectors, and I refuse to use a separate moisturizer when I'm putting on sunscreen.

That's all I can think of for now!

I have been bombing... bath bombing that is.

The fruits of my recent labours. The beige one is oatmeal, milk, and honey, and contains colloidal oatmeal and goat milk powder. No actual honey because sugary things can cause yeast infections. :/ The pink and white one is rose scented, the solid light yellow-y one is champagne and smells hella boozy. The turquoise, orange, and yellow one is called tropical honeymoon, and is scented with a mix of pineapple, coconut, frangipani, and margarita. The frangipani was incredibly strong and overpowering when it was first made, but thankfully it has mellowed a bit and you can actually smell the coconut now. And the purple and white one on top that is not wrapped yet (because I just made it) is called seduction; it is fragranced with a mix of jasmine and sandalwood, a combination I quite enjoy. The white dots are 1:1 sodium bicarb:citric acid with no oils or solubilizers, to provide some really active fizzing, and maybe some spin; there are a few more white chunks buried inside.

My first genuinely aggravating cosmetic chemistry experience - creamy face wash

I've been eyeing Susan's cream cleanser recipes for a while now; particularly the second one on this page, the cream cleanser for normal to oily skin - for people who aren't big on oils, because I have oily skin. In the past, I have been really attracted to cream cleansers; my skin is sensitive and prone to tightness and itching after cleansing, cream cleansers help mitigate those reactions. Plus I just really like the way they feel on my skin.

I was also excited to try using sodium cocoyl isethionate (SCI), a solid surfactant, and the key ingredient in Dove bars, which have been my go-to body cleanser (and occasional face cleanser) for the last 15 years or so. I know I like the feel of this surfactant.

So yesterday I got out my alchemy notebook, where I had modified Susan's formula to make it a bit simpler (I'm not as fond of extracts, hydrolyzed proteins, and film-formers as she is... particularly not in a rinse-off product), and got cooking. I believe Susan usually uses SCI in prill form containing 35% actives. Mine is in flake form with 85% actives. I didn't change the percentage being used, although possibly I should have. I put the flakes (which are actually more like small chunks) in a beaker with the cocamidopropyl betaine called for, which acts as a solvent for the SCI, into a double boiler and heated it up. And stirred. And heated. And stirred. And heated. Ad nauseum.

It took for. ever. In fact it might have literally taken forever, but after 90 minutes or 2 hours, I got sick of waiting. I dumped the paste into a frying pan and put it directly on the heat. It gelatinized a tiny bit. I poured in the second beaker of heated ingredients (including decyl glucoside, another substance that helps to dissolve SCI), and mixed it up hoping to thin it out a bit and maybe melt some more of the SCI chunks. The vapours of sizzling decyl glucoside were too much. I took it off the heat and pressed the whole horrible mess through a strainer, scraping the waxy chunks of SCI out of the mesh periodically. I ended up with about a third of the volume I expected. I put in my preservative, honeyquat, hydrolyzed protein, and Crothix and mixed it up. I included 1% salicylic acid in it, as I have acne, but when I tested the pH it was 6, probably due to the high pH of the decyl glucoside. I didn't adjust it since I was doubtful that it was going to be a nice thing to put on my face anyway.

Now that it has cooled, it is beyond thick. Thicker than Plasticine in winter. I gouged out a chunk and kneaded it into a thinner paste with some tap water and rubbed it around on my face. It kind of burned. The pH was almost neutral, so it shouldn't be caused by that; I'm wondering if my skin doesn't like decyl glucoside, as my micellar water test that included it was also exceptionally burn-y.

So, this was a frustrating process with an unsatisfying outcome. Maybe I will try to invent my own recipe for a cream cleanser now that I have put a bunch of my SCI through the blender to powderize it....

Body butter reredux

I made my third attempt at duplicating the Body Shop's body butter. Attempts one and two were kind of fails. The second one was less bad than the first, but after I stirred the bubbles out of it some time after it had cooled it was pretty liquidy. It also got really hot here for a while and the body butter got even more liquidy and looked like it might be separating... or at least something was solidifying out of it. One of the oil-soluble ingredients probably.

Anyway, I switched from copying the Body Shop mango body butter to the strawberry. I left out ingredients that I didn't have (this only applied to ingredients found lower down in the list, therefore used at low concentrations anyway) such as strawberry seed oil, which is surely only included for label appeal, but stuck to the relative proportions of each ingredient as determined by the ingredient list. This one includes cetearyl alcohol as well as shea and cocoa butters, so I hoped thickening would be less of an issue than it has been up to now. Glyceryl stearate (and) PEG-100 stearate seems to be a tricky emulsifier. Maybe not as tricky as the conditioner/emulsifier, stearamidopropyl dimethylamine (I'm not linking to the bajillion posts I wrote about that, since, frankly, it makes up most of the blog at this point), but pretty tricky. Certainly much harder to work with than emulsifying wax NF and BTMS-50.

My hopes in this recipe seem not to have been misplaced. It thickened nicely as it cooled, although it is still not as firm as the Body Shop strawberry body butter (it is more similar to the Body Shop mango body butter in consistency, actually). We'll see, it may still firm up some more; it is only a few hours old right now. It feels nice on the skin, spreads well due to the fairly high cyclomethicone content, and smells great! I scented this test batch with a copy of BBW's rice flower and shea from Canwax.

Overall, pleased.


UPDATE - Sept 6, 2016: The body butter has thickened up a little more over the last day and a half. It is really nice. I think I might stick with this recipe, or a very similar one with maybe a touch more cetearyl alcohol. We shall see. I have read that it can take up to a week for products made with  glyceryl stearate (and) PEG-100 stearate to come to their final viscosity.

Also I love this fragrance.

Woot.


UPDATE - Sept 9, 2016: It's been 5 days since I made this body butter, and I've got to say, I'm loving it. It has thickened up quite significantly since it was made, and it's pretty much perfect. It is still not as firm as the Body Shop's strawberry body butter, on which the recipe is based, but I think it may actually be thicker than the Body Shop's mango variety. I think this recipe might be the one I stick with, at least for my xmas gifting plans. I could easily swap out a percentage of the shea and/or cocoa butters if I wanted to include some mango butter or something, but I quite like it the way it is. It has some lasting power if I apply it through the day; I'd say the greasy feel lasts about half an hour and I can still feel it until I wash my hands. However, when applied after a shower, my skin seems to be drinking it up. The dry-down is what I would call silky.

And yeah, the fragrance. Rice flower and shea is amazing


UPDATE - Sept 14, 2016: I still love it. In fact, I'm probably 2/3 of the way through my test batch, which is a definite indicator of how much I like it. This one's a keeper for sure.

Bath bomb redux

Soooo... I tested out the half-bomb from my black tea bomb batch. It fizzed great. However, there was a major issue. I had scented them at 2%, per Bramble Berry's fragrance calculator (using some random fragrance), for a medium-strength scent. They were way, way over-scented. Also, the fragrance oil was not emulsified, so when I set off the bomb in the sink, the oil all floated on the surface of the water. Since fragrance oils are concentrated and not meant (or indeed safe) to be used straight on the skin, I don't think they are usable. Aside from the fact that using it would be like a lemony tea kick in the face.

I tried again today with a smaller batch. (Is it possible to crush up and re-batch bath bombs the way you can with soap? I have 5 black tea bombs that could be diluted and emulsified....)

This time I made enough mix for just one bath bomb with some leftovers for making wee testers in an ice cube tray. I included some oat flour and powdered goat milk, polysorbate-80 and oatmeal, milk, and honey fragrance oil (at 1% this time). The polysorbate-80 should make this more of a foaming bath bomb than a fizzing one, but that's fine, it's meant to be a calming milk and oatmeal bath, not an exciting bubbly bath. ;)

The testers are like little bath bomb jujubes!

I definitely need to test this one before I let anyone use it. With a milk powder in it, there is a possibility that when it is put in water and the milk rehydrates that it might form curds due to the presence of the citric acid. Cheese is awesome, but not in the bath water. :D


UPDATE - Sept 6, 2016: I tried out one of the little tester bombs in a bowl of water yesterday. I made a video of it that I thought of uploading here, but the file was huge and was taking forever to upload from my phone to my Google Drive and I ran out of patience. Suffice it to say, it was a great success compared to the last batch. The bomb fizzed and foamed nicely. It smelled good and not overwhelming. The oils (FO and sweet almond oil I decided to include in this recipe) were reasonably well emulsified by the polysorbate-80, though perhaps I could use just a touch more. The milk powder didn't turn into curds and whey in the presence of the citric acid. And the only floaty bits were tiny pieces of ground oatmeal, which were 100% expected.

Verdict: Much better.

Quote of the day:

"Where are you, candy thermometer? Oh, there you are. In the measuring cup... with my quinoa."

Dreams DO come true!

How quick was that?! 100 g of citric acid, 200 g of baking soda, some colourant, some fragrance, and a spray bottle full of denatured alcohol, and here we are, 5.5 - 1.75" diameter bath bombs later!

Cue the Staples button: "That was easy!"

The fragrance is New Directions Aromatics black tea, which is quite lemony. The colours didn't quite work out as I had planned; I'd hoped for brown and yellow, but I used liquid dyes so they kind of balled up in the powder. Maybe I really do need to buy more ingredients....

Pining for the fizzy fjords

I want to make bath bombs! I definitely have ingredients to do it, so I should probably just use what I have instead of visiting every supplier's website and making ever-expanding shopping carts.... I also don't know why I have a sudden bath bomb obsession, especially since I've never actually used one. I made a trail bomb a few months ago in the peak of summer's humidity. I had to aim a fan at it for 24 or 48 hours as it was drying out so that the water vapour in the air wouldn't set off the fizzing reaction! I set it off on the floor of my shower some days later to try it out. It was scented with spearmint essential oil and was uncoloured.

I kinda want to try making pretty ones. I have concentrated lab colours that that should work in bath bombs, and dog knows I have fragrance oils! Maybe that will have to be a project for tonight, or for the upcoming alchemy weekend I'll be having while my husband is away visiting friends south of the border. Can't wait!