During the last couple of years and specially since my closer collaboration with Formula Botanica, I have to forget about my laboratory mixers and homogenizers, put myself in students' shoes and try to find a way for them to follow a certain recipe or procedure.
Laboratory instruments are quite nice things and make one's life easier and happier, specially if you're preparing tens of samples and batches day-in and day-out but they make a deep hole in one's pocket (specially if one is in the start-up phase) and would be a trifle or extravagance as long as you have no certain orientation in the world of cosmetic formulation.
This is why I always recommend students to improvise and wait until they really have a certain plan or orientation. Maybe at the end of your diploma you decide to remain a soap maker and make no emulsions at all, or prefer to make tonics, oils and butters. In these cases a homogenizer is absolutely superficial and unnecessary for you. It is even possible that you come up to a collaboration with an existing lab and are allowed to use their facility a few hours per week or you decide to outsource the formulation from the very beginning and spare yourself the whole formulation, safety assessment, stability tests and other stories.
As long as you're a student or a start-up artisan manufacturer making small trial batches, you don't necessarily need a professional homogenizers to make stable emulsions and creams (although it can and will facilitate your life).
Your most important tool as a cosmetic chemist is????? click here for the answer.
To make life easier for you and spare you the expenses of laboratory instruments, I have been experimenting (you can call it playing as well) with some affordable kitchen blenders and mixers. I've prepared samples with exactly the same formulation and observed their characteristics over time, appearance, stability, viscosity even skin feel and I'm going to publish some exciting results in a couple of weeks.
