Episode 328 - Desert dates in your skin serums, Chelating shampoos and more

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

Hello, and welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty product questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 328 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and today is a solo show. Valerie is tied up with her raw material business and formulating business, and I am traveling, but we hadn't done a show in a while, and I wanted to get a show out and answer a bunch of questions that have been piling up. So today, I'm just going to answer as many questions as I can in kind of a rapid format setting. And yeah, let's just head on over to the questions.

Our first question comes to us from Zamzam. Zamzam says, does sedal alcohol wash off using anionic surfactants, or does it wash off by itself?

So if you don't know, sedal alcohol is a common ingredient that you're going to find in hair care products. Normally, it's going to be something that's used in hair conditioners. It's used to give it the conditioner an opaque look, the white, creamy look. Sedal alcohol is part of that. It's what you would call also a co-emulsifier because it's a little bit compatible with oils, but it's also compatible with water.

It can actually have a thickening effect too. So, sedal alcohol, though, typically will rinse away just with the water. You do not need any special anionic surfactants to wash it away. You know, because it is a bit of an emulsifier, it has an OH group on the end of it, and so that's going to stick out and combine with water. So, it can usually be lifted off and rinses away by itself. You don't really need an anionic surfactant specifically, and in a conditioner, in fact, there are just cationic surfactants and other emulsifiers, which pretty much help to remove the acetyl alcohol. So, do you need anionic surfactants to remove acetyl alcohol? No, you do not. It's a good ingredient. And incidentally, it's not an alcohol like ethanol, although they both have OH groups on the molecule. It's vastly different, and if you're worried about alcohol drying out your hair or your skin, acetyl alcohol is not the kind of alcohol that would do that.

Our next question comes to us from Amy. Amy says, thanks for what you do. Great podcast, very informative. I had a question for you. What do you think of dessert dates in skincare products? I'm looking to try products with this in it, but I don't know if I should. All I know is it's a good anti-inflammatory and it has components of benzoic acid. I'm not sure if that's right about this, but that's what the article said. Anyway, what do you guys think?

Always need an ingredient in your skincare for you to believe, but dessert dates? Look, if you want a product that has benzoic acid in it, then look for benzoic acid. Whenever you're getting a plant extract that has a level of an ingredient, be it a vitamin or salicylic acid or benzoic acid, it's always gonna be better to just get that ingredient rather than the extract. Because as plant extracts go, you never know what you're getting.

You don't know how the ingredient was extracted from the plant. You don't know the solvent that it's in. And you also don't know how much of the ingredient is in your final formula. Typically, when we would use extracts in our formulations, we would buy a 1% solution.

The 1% would be the plant part. And the other 99% was something like propylene glycol or glycerin. And then we would take of that solution, we would put 0.1% in the finished formula. That's enough to be able to claim that it's on the label.

But it's not really doing anything in there. And so as far as dessert dates go, I haven't seen any evidence that a dessert date extract would provide you any special benefit to the skin. If it has benzoic acid in it, I would say look for a product that specifically lists benzoic acid.

You know, dates, dessert dates.

I just don't see any special benefit that you're gonna get from it. You know, I think it makes an interesting story and I would expect it's going to have some sort of proteins in it. So it could give you a humectin effect. So it could attract moisture to the skin. But I wouldn't expect you to notice any real benefit. I would say stick with the standard, good old fashioned moisturizers and leave the dates on your dessert.

Our next question comes to us from Shirley. She's asking about serums. Can you talk about how long it takes for a skincare ingredient to penetrate the skin and gain the benefits from them? I mean, I guess this all depends on what you mean by penetration. If you just mean that you put a product on your skin and then you rub it in until it is gone, then that can be pretty quick for a well formulated emulsion. The more occlusive agent you have in there, the more greasy it's gonna feel, the more emollients that can make it feel greasier. But if you formulate it right and you have the right emulsion system, it can rub in pretty quickly.