Third try at shampoo - rhubarb!

I was down to one little blob of my sandalwood shampoo, plus I had just received a new shipment of ingredients, so it was time to make another batch! My new ingredients included some different surfactants and (insert singing angels here) proper surfactant thickener!

My last two shampoo attempts saw steady improvement directly correlated with a steady increase in the concentration of surfactants. I was not totally happy with the cleaning ability of the last one as it took some work to get it onto my scalp and into any kind of lather there, so I increased the surfactant concentration again. I also decided to include one of my new suractants, sodium C14-16 olefin sulfonate, which, according to Susan, is a gentle but effective degreaser, along with my regular cocamidopropyl betaine and sodium laureth sulfate. I was aiming for 50% surfactants, but a pouring mishap meant I ended up with 55%. I included a bit of glycerin, though I have reduced it a bit from last time because my hair tends toward frizziness. My formula also included water, of course, cyclomethicone and dimethicone, hydrolyzed oats, panthenol, and a preservative. I needed only half a percent of thickener (Crothix, INCI PEG-150 pentaerythrityl tetrastearate (and) PEG-6 caprylic/capric trigylcerides (and) water), and it is perfect shampoo consistency. Hooray!

It is fragranced with a fragrance oil called ruby rhubarb. So good! Rhubarb is one of my favourite things ever. I want to be a rhubarb farmer. I received some colourants in my shipment too, so I coloured it a pinky red. I considered trying to somehow make a rhubarb-esque red-to-green gradient, but realized it would just end up brown as it mixed.

I've used it once so far, and it's pretty great. I don't need to use much because it has a high surfactant concentration. It lathers really well and leaves my hair and scalp (yay) feeling clean. It is definitely not very conditioning, and I don't think I'd dare trying to run my fingers through my hair as I rinse it out for fear of tightening knots and breaking hairs. Running my fingers through as I rinse shampoo is a habit I've gotten into over the last couple of years and I'm trying to stop, since I think it is contributing to my split ends and breakage. Once I applied conditioner, my hair felt great and easily untangled with my fingers.

24 hours after using this shampoo, my hair was abnormally grease-free, to the point where I actually debated washing it again. That never happens, and certainly not on a 30° day. I think this formula might be a winner!

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.