How to improve the skin feel of your scrubs

After we've announced the formulation challenge for May-June, some of the students who made the scrubs and used them were not quite happy with the skin feel. They've had a greasy skin feel after rinsing and just felt all right after they've rubbed their skin with a towel.

This is, somehow quite logic. Applying water over an oil based product makes the oil feel heavier and somehow sticky. The skin feel might be more or less sticky/greasy depending on the oils and butters you might use in the product but to completely get rid of it, one needs a suitable emulsifier to emulsify the butter when it comes into contact with water.

I have made my original coffee scrubs with Sunflower lecithin. I added it both as a skin feel enhancer and as an emulsifier.

After reading students comments, I decided to try our new amulsifier for self-emulsifying oleogels in a scrub formulation and test it vs. lecithin as an emulsifier and a scrub formulation without any emulsifier.

For this experiment we used wild rice as the exfolliant.

This is the recipe for the scrub with the emulsifier (gel-to-milk system):

Procedure:

1- In a water bath, melt all ingredients of phase A. Stir gently while ingredients are melting.(water temperature should not exceed 60 degrees)

2- After all the ingredients are melted, remove the beaker from the water bath and add the ingredients in phase B. Blend gently

3- Put the beaker in an ice-water bath (or in the fridge) and stir it during coold down. Stir till the blend starts a light trace.

4- Add the essential oils and the rice and blend completely.

5- Pour the scrub into suitable moulds and bring the moulds into the fridge.

6- Let the moulds stay in the fridge for at least 6 hours (if you can be patient even overnight) before de-moulding the precious pieces

Self-emulsifying test

To check the emulsifying efficacy of  Dermofeel G5O , we've prepared 3 samples:

• with 5%  Dermofeel G5O as emulsifier
• With 5%  Sunflower lecithin as emulsifier
• with no emulsifier at all

Here, we've added one piece of each scrub into hot water. From left to right: sunflower lecithin, Dermofeel G5O and no emulsifier.

From this angle, you can better judge the difference

Lecithin needs time to create an emulsion but is certainly better than the sample without any emulsifier. Dermofeel G5O emulsifies perfectly in water and the sample without any emulsifier obviously does not emulsify at all.

Let's see if you can find a suitable emulsifier for your scrubs or if you can try a similar experiment. Don't hesitate to share your results and photos on our facebook page.

BeHappy and have fun