Tips

Q&A Quickies: Let’s talk about water – distilled, spring, mineral, alkaline, and reverse osmosis

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For the love of all that is good and holy, do not use tap water in your products! It’s full of all kinds of things – chlorine, fluoride, metals, bits of soil, and so much more – that can mess up the clarity, stability, preservation, and general goodness of your products. Check out this post...

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A few thoughts on how much fragrance oil to use in my formulas…

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I’ve been formulating since 2006 and writing this blog since 2009, and fragrance oils have changed a lot during that time, becoming much, much stronger, so we need to use far less. Products into which I would have used 1% are now a bit strong at 0.3%. – so my recommendations are to use 0.1%...

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Q&A: What does palm- or coco- etc. mean in an ingredient name?

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When we’re looking at INCI names, you’ll see things like stearate, palmitate, cocoate, and more. What do these names mean? When an ingredient is derived from fatty acids, you’ll see a name like sodium stearate or ethylhexyl palmitate indicating which one they’ve used. If you see laur- in a name, it means it’s derived from lauric...

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Tips & techniques: How to add new ingredients into a formula that contains water

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In my formulas, you might see me say something like – use 10% hydrosol in place of 10% distilled water – or – use 0.5% powdered extract in the cool down phase, remove 0.5% distilled water – and I thought maybe I should explain that a bit? Our formulas should always total 100%. There are...

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Using powdered surfactants, like SCI, SCS, or SLSa in liquid products and why they fail

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I’m seeing a lot of people trying to use powdered surfactants in liquid products – like shower gels, body washes, bubble baths – and although I hate to be the bearer of bad news, this isn’t a stable or easy way to use them. These will start to solidify, leaving you with a bottle of...

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