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....

Oil-based cleansing balm, and a possible revelation

I've been reading skin care stuff online as one does, and have come across oil-based cleansing balms a few times now. The Eve Lom product piqued my interest, because who the hell spends the UK equivalent of $100 on 100 ml of cleanser?! It also interested me because Eve Lom is a facecloth advocate, and I think facecloths are quaint. Another balm and facecloth champion is Caroline Hirons, a UK celebrity esthetician and blogger with about a million loyal minions.

The whole oil cleansing thing seems so bizarre to me, especially as a sensitive, oily, acne-prone skinned person who wholly refused to moisturize until I started using a prescription retinoid 2 years ago. I understand, and agree with, the chemical principle of like dissolving like, but... residue! How are you supposed to get all that residual oil off your skin without following up your oil cleanse with a proper cleanser?! Ain't nobody got time for that! I tried oil cleansing a whole of one time. I believe I mixed up 7 g of grapeseed oil and 3 g of castor oil (supposedly a good mix for oily skin), rubbed it on my face, and then scrubbed the bejesus out of my skin with a facecloth trying to get all the oil off. I'm pretty sure that within 30 minutes I had gone back and re-cleaned my face with a normal surfactant-based cleanser. It just wasn't for me.

So I read the ingredients of the Eve Lom stuff. Colour me skeptical when I saw that the first ingredient is mineral oil. Cheapest. Ingredient. Ever. Anyway, I kept reading and saw that her product contains not just oils, but also emulsifiers (a couple different PEG lanolins). That's where I started to see the light. I still think that the "all natural" oil cleansing is kind of bunk, especially for oily-skinned people, but if you add an emulsifier to your cleansing oil, that will increase its solubility - and therefore rinse-ability - in water. So it might actually come off your skin.

I decided to have another go at this oily nonsense, so I whipped up a super-simple pseudo-dupe of the Eve Lom cleanser, complete with 75% mineral oil. I substituted PEG-40 castor oil for the PEG lanolins, since it's the most similar emulsifier I have, and threw in some cetearyl alcohol and cocoa butter. I added the tiniest amount of clove and eucalyptus essential oils, and that was it.

Per the instructions of both Eve Lom and Caroline Hirons, I applied the stuff (similar consistency to Burt's Bees hand salve, if you are familiar with that) to my dry face and gave it a good rubbing-in. It felt oily. I wet a facecloth in hot water, wrung it out, and held it over my face for a few seconds. I repeated this step a few times, since the heat is supposedly essential for oily skin as it allows the cleanser to penetrate into my greasy pores. Following that I used my hot, wet facecloth to scrub the cleanser off, rinsing it a few times along the way. Lo and behold, my skin felt clean! Not oily! It was pretty remarkable. I felt like the balm rinsed cleanly off my hands too, and my facecloth did not feel like it was saturated in oil after rinsing. All so unexpected.

After drying my face off with a towel and giving it a few minutes to evaporate off the leftover moisture, I touched my skin. It felt really, incredibly soft.

Anyway, I've been at this for a few days now and haven't had any catastrophic results yet. I'll update if my acne explodes or anything, likewise if my skin suddenly becomes my best feature (a girl can dream, right?).

A note on facecloths: I've tried using them in the past, as my skin doesn't seem to react too well to the high levels of alcohol contained in most chemical exfoliants. I've always found that the added stimulation increases my oil production, and since starting prescription acne meds 2 years ago, I have stuck to hands-only cleansing with surfactant-based sensitive skin cleansers (either Cliniderm gentle cleanser or Cerave foaming cleanser). This system has worked quite well for me in combination with the meds, and Cliniderm protective lotion SPF 45 in the day or Spectro blemish-prone moisturizer overnight. I'm still using my meds and moisturizers and will switch back to my cleanser system if I have any problems... and probably when I run out of this balm, at least until I finish up the products that I already have.

UPDATE (Aug 8, 2016): So, after about 3 days of using this, I was developing 2 new pimples on my chin, boo. I went back to a regular cleanser the evening of Aug 5 and haven't had any new ones appear since then. Oh well, I only have one application of this stuff left anyway, maybe I'll use it up as a pre-cleanse and be done with it.

My version of "facial wash with a ton of extracts"

Hot on the heels of my conditioner success, I thought I'd go for a more-or-less guaranteed success: a surfactant product. I modified a version of Susan Barclay-Nichols' Facial Wash with a Ton of Extracts, from her Formulating Facial Products ebook, to suit me and to include some extracts I got in my most recent ingredients shipment (it arrived before the postal strike, woo!).

Frankly, Susan's version of this looks like a mix of blood and mud, but that is due to the extracts she chose to include, not due to the basic ingredients. My version contains the green tea and cucumber peel extracts, so it is yellow-y green. I also put in 2% salicylic acid, which seems to have precipitated after the mixture cooled, but is staying mostly dispersed, so I just shake it up before using.

I don't know if it is the undissolved SA (don't think so as I've made a 2% SA cleanser that had the same problem before), the cucumber peel extract (Susan says some people can be sensitive to it), or the surfactants I chose, but I find it a touch burn-y along the edges of my eyelids when I wash my face with it. I didn't make that much of it, so I'll just use it up. I'd like to come up with a SA recipe I really like, as I've been noticing more blackheads on my nose lately. Maybe because it's summer.

An attempt at product duplication

Back before I became a scientist, and before I had seriously considered what the word "natural" means, and before I was considering efficacy at the same level (or above) as "natural"-ness, there was a face wash I liked. It is called DermaMed Acne Wash. It has only four ingredients listed, so I thought it might be a good starting place for attempting a product duplication.

The ingredients are water, green tea extract, cocamidopropyl betaine, and salicylic acid. There is no preservative explicitly listed in the ingredients. It seems likely that the anti-acne ingredient, salicylic acid, is also serving as the preservative. This is a common trick used by "natural" products companies; they tend to use multi-purpose ingredients so they can claim "no preservatives," which is a silly claim to make if your consumers have even the vaguest knowledge of biology.

Salicylic acid is allowable in European cosmetic products as a preservative at up to 0.5% (reference); the consensus seems to be that it is bactericidal, and works against mould and fungi, but that its efficacy is dependent on the formulation.

So, I gave it a shot. I took a guess at how much surfactant (cocamidopropyl betaine, the ingredient that makes this a cleanser) they might have used, my guess was 16%. I knew the salicylic acid was 2%, because they have to state the concentration of active/medicinal ingredients. Extracts are generally used at 1-2% or less, so I went for 1%. And water makes up the rest.

I boiled up my water and mixed it with the other ingredients. I was doubtful about the salicylic acid dissolving nicely, since I'd seen it precipitate before. Surfactants can help with the solubility though, so I was willing to try. I put my definitely-not-the-same-colour-as-the-commercial-product concoction into a foamer bottle, since it was super runny (runnier than the store-bought version, probably meaning I had used less surfactant than they did), and went about my business. The commercial producer likely used a liquid green tea extract (and a green dye by the looks of things), while I was using a powdered extract, so that would account for the colour difference.

A while later I had a look at my bottle of stuff; it seemed like the surfactant and green tea were sticking together and separating out of the water. I gave it a shake and let it be. Overnight, the salicylic acid precipitated out of the solution.

I liked how smooth it made my skin feel, so I used it in spite of its shortcomings, just shaking it up before pumping some out so I wouldn't get a face-full of salicylic acid, but I only made 50 g and I doubt if I will try this recipe again without major modifications. It really does make me wonder how accurate the product labelling is.