A handy skin care ingredient
Here’s an ingredient with a mixed pedigree. Lanolin is a pure and rather lovely natural ingredient derived from wool. PEG-75 Lanolin is lanolin that has been ethoxylated. This means that the lanolin is treated with ethylene oxide to make it more water soluble. This enables it to be used in ways that you can’t use lanolin itself. Continue reading
There’s a lot you can do with sugar.
After the huge success of BB creams a lot of attention has been given to the rest of the alphabet. We still don’t know what the next combination to take the industry by storm will be. A lot of us thought that the trend would stick with consonants, but there has been interest in vowels as well. It’s a crazy world out there. But another line of enquiry is to look at what is happening in the East, and specifically Korea, to see if there are any more innovations heading down the line. Continue reading
I was misintroduced as a food chemist at a party once. I was asked if I was the one who put the polysorbate 80 in the yoghurts. I should have said was ‘no, that was Brian’. I didn’t think quickly enough.
Polysorbate 80 is widely enough used in food products for many people to recognise the name. It is much less widely used in cosmetics, but is nonetheless something you will see on ingredient lists from time to time. You’ll also see polysorbates with other numbers, like polysorbate 20 for example. Continue reading
Well here is a challenge. Can I write an interesting post about a very basic raw material? Glyceryl stearate is one of the names you will see cropping up on ingredient lists pretty often, especially for creams. I always call it glyceryl monstearate but its official name is glyceryl stearate. What is it?
