Prebiotic shampoo with saponin powder

What could be better than a prebiotic shampoo made with natural surfactants, caffein, conditioning and pampering ingredients such as aloe powder and the heavenly scent of coffee?

You can use this product as a vitalizing shower gel, a shampoo or an all-in-one head to toe cleanser.

The formulation is kept very simple and without much knick-knack just to give you a starting point to know how to work with the saponin powder and how to apply it in a product.

About instruments:

We used an overhead mixer with a propeller through the whole procedure. You can prepare small batches without any instruments and with only one spatula but at the end you will have lots of bubbles in the shampoo.

Facility mixers are either equipped with deareator or a centrifuge to get rid of the foam and bubbles that are produced during the manufacturing process. We didn't use any of these additional techniques and just added the surfactant phase very slowly (I mean really snail speed) and the product is quite acceptable and with very little bubbles.

You can even use a magnetic stirrer to blend the powder phase with the hydrosol phase and that will make your life much easier and the process much faster. Magnetic stirrer couldn't be used for dispersion of gum, specially by this high concentration of gum. You can use a hand mixer such as Blendia or dynamix or even the thermomix or Vitamix to disperse the gum but be aware that all of these methods create much more foam than an overhead mixer.

Formulation

Procedure:

1- Blend phase A in a beaker at room temperature

2- Add the powder phase either one by one or all together depending on the stirring technique you are using

3- When all phase B is dissolved in the hydrosol phase disperse and hydrate the gum at room temperature

4- Blend the surfactant phase in another container. Try to blend as little as possible to avoid excessive foaming

5- When the gum is fully dispersed, gradually and slowly add the surfactant phase. This is the most important and time consuming part of the whole procedure.

6- When the surfactant phase is fully blended prepare a 10% dilution and measure the pH. In our case it was 5,42 and it is Ok to add the preservative

7- Add the preservative. We know by experience that this preservative blend increases the pH and we added lactic acid at the same time to reduce the pH. You may need to prepare another dilution and measure the pH before adding any acid or base at this stage

8- We added about 0,12% lactic acid (80%) and made another 10% dilution and remeasured the pH and it was 5,38 and that is perfectly in range

9- Take stability and micro kit samples and fill the rest in a suitable container

Watch the video here

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