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photo: Radowitz/Shutterstock.com
photo: Radowitz/Shutterstock.com

Nowadays customers are looking for products with less or even no packaging and buying more sustainable face brands. For some, sustainable means formulations without water. Laura Ratz and Annika Kramer talk about the challenges and advantages of developing water-free cosmetics. 

Interview with: 

Laura Ratz, Application Scientist

Annika Kramer, Senior Application Scientist,

Nordmann, Rassmann GmbH, ­
Hamburg, Germany,
www.nordmann.global

COSSMA: What challenges come with making water-free formulations?

Laura Ratz, Annika Kramer: The first challenge in creating water-free formulations is that many of the raw materials used in the formulation of personal care products contain water, for example actives or surfactants. This means they cannot be used in water-free formulations and alternatives must be found for some of the most popular ingredients used by formulators. Another of the big challenges is to create products that perform similarly to conventional products.  Skin care products typically need to produce a nice skin feel both during and after use, while cleansing products are expected to foam a lot and leave skin feeling clean. With a high concentration of oils and butters, solid personal care products can feel too heavy and greasy on the skin.

The production process of water-free, solid products on a larger scale can also come with its own challenges. Solid shampoos or shower bars usually need to be poured into moulds at the right temperature, for instance, and this requires special manufacturing equipment.

Finally, water is quite inexpensive compared to other used raw materials. Water-free formulations usually are based on more expensive ingredients, which can be a challenge for formulators when it comes to creating a quality product with a lower price point.

Which ingredients are particularly well suited to solid formulations?

Essentially, the primary ingredients for making water-free formulations include butters, waxes and emollients like oils or esters. Butters with superior crystallisation profiles, like Lipex Shea or Lipex CocoaSoft, are very suitable because they offer great benefits for both skin and hair and can also add texture to water-free and solid formulations.

Using different combinations of waxes allows consistency to be built up, which is particularly important for solid and packaging-free formulations such as solid body bars. 

Depending on the application type and skin feel desired, different emollients can be used.

Some vegetable oils such as argan oil are already well-known ingredients for conventional personal care products due to the great properties they offer, particularly for hair, and can be good choices for water-free products. There is also a broad selection of actives suitable, for example oil-based vegetable extracts.

For the formulation of cleansing products, surfactants supplied in powder form are a good option. Lathanol Lal Coarse is a sulfate-free surfactant, which provides a rich and creamy lather when used in both solid shampoos and soaps.

Bio-Terge AS-90 Coarse is a highly foaming and sulfate-free anionic surfactant.

Starches also make a great addition to water-free products. Nativacare rice, corn and tapioca starches, for example, give products a more pleasant skin feel both during and after use. They also prevent the formation of cracks in solid formulations and help avoid a heavy, greasy feel being left on the skin as a result of high oil and butter content.

How well do these formulations perform, especially when compared to conventional products?

One important criterion for solid shampoos and shower bars is the quality and amount of foam they produce. Consumers usually want their rinse-off products to produce a decent amount of foam. 

Fortunately, even when solid shampoos contain a high amount of oils and butters, it is still possible to get them to foam well by using surfactants like Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate or/and Sodium C14-16 Olefin Sulfonate. The use of foaming boosters can also be very helpful in boosting this type of performance. To create anhydrous deodorants that can perform competitively against conventional deodorant sticks and roll-ons, actives like Cavamax cyclodextrins are suitable for producing water-free formulations.

Lipex Smp, an emollient with a sharp melting profile, helps provide a nice, non-greasy and non-tacky skin feel.

Water-free skin care products also offer great benefits. They contain high concentrations of butters and oils which nourish and condition the skin.They can be enriched with precious vitamins and extracts, tailored to the needs of every skin type.

Which approaches have you used that are particularly innovative?

While working on water-free formulations, we decided to target as many different applications as possible. Shampoo bars have become very popular in the past few years, as many consumers are deciding to replace their bottled shampoos with solid equivalents in an effort to produce less waste.

Inspired by this success, we decided to create several other solid cleansing formulations for different skin types to fit everybody’s needs. 

After we successfully formulated a deodorant stick, we also decided to create a packaging-free version of it to show what else you can do when you want by playing with the different ingredients. Our new package-free solid deodorant contains the same ingredients as the stick, but we changed the consistency to make it more practical to apply.

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