Colin's Beauty Pages

I am indebted to Fiona at Beauty Swap Shop for letting me know the actual ingredient listing of the now famous Waitrose Baby Bottom Butter. I had been assuming that it was simply olive oil blended with some other material, probably a wax, to thicken it up. That at any rate is how I would have gone about producing a bottom butter. It turns out that this isn’t how the Waitrose product works. What they have done is use hydrogenated olive oil.

Hydrogenation of fats and oils is something that has been done for years but which has got steadily more controversial. When you hydrogenate an oil you bubble hydrogen gas through it in the presence of a catalyst such as paladium. This usually makes the oil thicker, often turning a liquid oil into a solid, and gives it a longer shelf life. This is very handy for the food industry so it is not surprising that processed foods use hydrogenated fats and oils heavily. It doesn’t seem to affect the taste very much. What it does affect is the structure of the oils. In nature the molecules in oils are long and thin. Hydrogenation creates new molecules not found in nature that are much larger and have very different shapes. There are quite a few families of these and if you are a chemist like me they are quite interesting. The most notorious of them are the trans-fats. These are quite unlike anything else in the diet and it has been suggested that if you eat a lot of them they can be incorporated into membranes in your blood vessels. Here their unusual shape disrupts the normal blood flow and can lead to heart attacks. I am not an expert in this area and like most topics where a great deal of money is at stake it has become quite controversial. All I can say is that as a chemist I think the argument against trans-fats sounds plausible and I myself avoid foods that contain anything hydrogenated.

What has this got to do with skin care? A lot of people would say nothing, including the Soil Association who have recently clarified their guidelines. They don’t approve the use of hydrogenated oils in personal care products. But you can use materials derived from hydrogenated oils. This may sound obscure. But a lot of cosmetic ingredients are made from natural sources, very often coconut oil. If you want like things natural this sounds good. But if the oil has been hydrogenated then you will have a lot of distinctly unnatural derivatives in there too. I have been talking to the Soil Association about this and sent them some papers with the technical background, so it is possible they may change their mind on this.

There is nothing magic about being natural. We come into contact with man-made materials every day: most of them are completely harmless. But I do think that there may be a problem with the products of hydrogenation on the skin. The barrier function of the skin comes from a very particular structure of the oils in its topmost layer. Natural oils fit into this structure very comfortably. Oils distorted by the hydrogenation process could be absorbed into the skin but with their unusual shape could easily disrupt the skin’s naural structure.

As a scientist I have to be honest and admit that I don’t have any direct evidence of an adverse effect of hydrogenated ingredients on the skin. What I can say is that the benefits of hydrogenation are ones that suit the manufacturers of the products and not the end users. I can also say that since I have stopped using hydrogenated materials in my formulation work I have got good feedback from people who have used them. You definitely don’t need to use hydrogenated materials to produce good formulations.

For example, I recently formulated a baby bottom balm for Artful Teasing. Instead of using a hydrogenated oil I used fractionated coconut oil, which is lighter than olive oil and is naturally resistant to going rancid because of the way it is extracted and purified. I thickened it up using organic shea butter and beeswax. With some essential oils, eucalyptus and chamomile, to give a bit of healing power it was ready to go. If I can ever get hold of the Waitrose product, I will compare the two products and see which is better.

Just one final word. The ingredient list on the pack doesn’t always tell you when a material has been hydrogenated. The names used have to be those published in the International Cosmetics Ingredient Dictionary, and many of the names don’t tell you. This has even fooled me when I found that a very commonly used grade of shea butter is hydrogenated.

But I was pleased to read that they have used vanillin, one of my favourites to give it a smell. Read my article on vanillin if you want to know why it makes you smell like ice cream.

Read my original article on Waitrose Baby Bottom Butter