Decyl glucoside micellar water

I have learned to start simple now. At least after two semi-fails.

Next surfactant on the to-try list is decyl glucoside. After the stinging I experienced with the caprylyl/capryl glucoside recipe, I stripped this one down to three ingredients: water, surfactant, and preservative. Just distilled water, 1% decyl glucoside, and Optiphen Plus.

Boiled the water, added the surfactant, cooled, added preservative, and mixed.

It foamed and stung when I used it. Boo. I had to rinse my skin after applying this, and it felt stripped, as though I had used a strong-ish rinse-off cleanser. That decyl glucoside is powerful stuff.

At this point I still hadn't put two and two together regarding the Optiphen stinging, I was too taken aback by all the foam!

Man wash

My dad loves Method's green tea and aloe fragrance (this stuff in particular). So I thought I'd try to make him a green tea scented all-in-one wash, since I know for a fact he regularly uses shampoo as body wash. My husband decided he wanted some too, but in a different flavour, so I made a biggish batch and split it in half before scenting it.

This one was an adventure in surfactants. I figured I'd use cocamidopropyl betaine because I use it in all my surfactanty things, and sodium laureth sulfate because it's a popular one, and because my formulating idol, Susan, usually uses three surfactants in any given product, I thought I'd add the only other one I currently possess, decyl glucoside.

Now, I know about decyl glucoside, and how hard it is to thicken, but I thought that because 2/3 of the surfactants were not decyl glucoside that I'd still be able to thicken it with salt. Wrong! So wrong!

When I'd mixed up all my ingredients it was about as thick as water. I tried adding 3% salt. No dice. "Xanthan gum!" I thought, "that's a thickener!" I added about a gram before bothering to look it up, only to find that it's incompatible with cationics, like the honeyquat I had also included. Then I got desperate. I found some gum arabic I had from a candy-making experiment a bunch of years ago and got that out. I swear to Dog, I added about 30 grams of it, along with some additional preservative to compensate. Now it is whitish, minutely thicker than it was before, and separates when left to sit into sections with and without floaty particles of organic gums.

Oh well, it foams. I scented it up and gave it to the guys with a bath pouf each. Are we counting fails? What number is this now?

I don't know what I'm going to do with the half-litre of decyl glucoside I have. I'm not the hugest fan of the foamer bottles, but I may have to adapt in order to use this stuff up.