Inventive Formulating Abounds Yet Questions Remain at SCC’s Scientific Seminar

By: Katie Schaefer, C&T magazine

Posted: June 23, 2010

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The conversation turned from sustainability to natural raw materials with a presentation on improved sensorial performance in natural formulations using polyglycerol modified plant waxes by Paula Lennon, personal care technical director of Gattefossé. She noted, “Textures are getting better in natural skin care due to more vegetable-based emollients.” According to Lennon, natural skin care needs improvements in fragrance and comfort. While plant waxes can reduce dehydration in cosmetics, they destabilize formulations and give poor skin feel. Lennon noted that PEG treatment can improve compatibility but is unsuitable for natural cosmetics. Her team therefore combined sunflower seed, mimosa and jojoba waxes with vegetable polyglycerol-3 by transesterification and polyglycerolysis. The resulting esters showed amphiphilic properties, improved formulability and skin feel.

The morning’s session was concluded with a presentation by Oliver Thum, PhD, head of biotechnology research in the consumer specialties business unit of Evonik Goldschmidt GmbH, who explained his company’s sustainable biocatalytic esterification process to produce emollient esters. According to Thum, his company’s process, in comparison to conventional processing, uses a lower reaction temperature for the catalyst, recycles the enzyme a number of times to be more cost-effective, is simpler and improves quality.

An awards luncheon followed the morning session, and as attendees dined, two industry awards were presented. The first award, the Henry Maso Keynote Award, was presented by Maso’s wife Joyce to Ken Marenus. Before presenting the award, Joyce Maso reflected, “Henry knew and admired Ken.” She discussed Maso’s love for educating young cosmetic chemists, proudly noting, “This award has come about from the work and energy of his young chemists.”

The Best Paper Award from the 2009 Annual Scientific Meeting was then presented to Craig Bonda of the HallStar Company by Pascal Herve of Rhodia Novecare, the award’s sponsor. Bonda co-authored the paper “Improving Sunscreen Photostability by Quenching the Singlet Excited State,” along with Anna Pavlovic, Kerry Hanson and Chris Bardeen. After being presented the award, Bonda graciously donated a portion of the prize back to the Henry Maso Award.

The afternoon’s presentations were focused on hair, starting with a keynote presentation by Jennifer Marsh, PhD, a research fellow at Procter & Gamble’s Miami Valley Innovation Center, who discussed new approaches for hair color products. She highlighted the three main changes in hair after it is colored: the surface energy is different due to removal of the F-layer, the hair's porosity is higher, and the cuticle quality is worse. These changes produce hair that feels different and requires more force to comb, according to Marsh. Marsh emphasized that colored hair should be considered a different substrate than virgin hair, and this involves creating different products designed for colored hair. She discussed three strategies to create hair care products for colored hair. In the first, Marsh’s team incorporated a liquid crystal colloidal structure into a shampoo to increase the hydrophobicity of the surface, thereby increasing silicone deposition from both the shampoo and the conditioner. The team also created a oxidant technology that combined ammonium carbonate, hydrogen peroxide and glycine at pH 9, and this reduction in pH in the oxidant reduced the loss of the F-layer. In addition, the copper-induced radical chemistry was reduced.