Humectant gel with oil sparks - project phase

This project became a bit of an obsession lately. I didn’t have all the raw materials I needed so I started on the theory part, now I have everything I need, time to work!

The base idea is to make a humectant gel in which we can find suspended little drops or sparks or a gellified oil. The challenges are diverse… On one side we need a transparent gel that is quite thick to be able to suspend the sparks. On the other hand we need to create the gellified sparks with the right consistency so they don’t ruin transparency and they are effective when applying on the skin.

Basically we are working with two phases but there is no emulsion this time. The humectant gel seemed quite simple but proven to be a bit more challenging than planned!

Try 1

I’ve tried different gellifiers for this task…. I knew from start that Xanthan Gum wasn’t going to create a thick enough gel to do the job I needed it to do, plus it’s well-known that the Xanthan doesn’t really feel nice on the skin when applied… It’s usually referred as “dog drool”, which apart from being funny… it’s true!

The video where I took the idea from was using a carbomer polymer, not exactly the one I had, but basically the lady said not to neutralize the gel until after adding the oil sparks… Otherwise it would be too hard to work… I tried this first and maybe I should do it again, because I went with a bigger amount of oil phase which ended up creating a gel than not only was not transparent but was not at all pleasant on the skin. Ok… it’s good to fail when you learn from it!

Try 2

The second trial was to reduce the oil phase by 50% (I would end up reducing ti a lot more and now it’s always around 2%). Doing exactly the same as the first time but reducing the oil sparks I got a better result in terms of skin feel but still wasn’t exactly what I wanted visually!

At that point I was using my new golden mica… well I’m not sure if it was mica… I’m still not that familiar with make up raw materials, but seemed like the gold oil spark was separating in a million pieces taking away from the transparency of the base gel.

Try 3

But the main problem was that once I neutralized the carbopol gel, after adding the oil sparks, I ended up with a totally not transparent gel! Tired of this I reformulated the whole thing this time using Aristoflex AVC as a gellifier and reducing even further the oil sparks… I decided on 1% of gold sparks and 1% of a colored sparks. Try 3 is one of the best ones so far… the problem is that now I ended up with a gel that even if it’s ok to suspend and hold the oil sparks and it’s quite transparent, it’s full of little bubbles…. They are not microbubbles, those that just simply take away transparency, and in any other gel it would be a lovely effect, but here…. Mmm…

Reducing the oil sparks was the best move, it’s hard to work with such a little amount (1% plus the micronized silice it’s complicated!) but the result was closer to what I was looking for. Basically the gel is more transparent, even though there are bubbles, and you can see the sparks that this time broke more evenly!

Try 4

I don’t know why for the next try I decided to use ialuronate sodium as humectant… I was finishing my propanediol and was not willing to waste it in experiments… but… ialuronate sodium doesn’t work well with gellifiers and ended up ruining my lovely thick gel… I still finished the experiment with the sparks to see what happened… but it’s not my favorite one so far…

Try 5

In order to achieve better transparency I decided to leave out the propanediol and use only glicerine, I used a bit of Xanthan Transparent to add to the Aristoflex as gellifiers and discarded the Polysorbate 20 that I had used in the last tried to solubilize the preservative and perfume. I obviously added the preservative not only because the gel should have been able to hold it, but also cause I discovered it was ok in water! Still even though the base gel was transparent when adding and breaking and mixing the sparks it lost transparency and even though it doesn’t look bad it’s still far from what I had achieved earlier.

More tries!

I still tried twice more. This time I made the gel and let it sit until most of the bubbles were gone. They don’t really go away, but whatever. I added the sparks and still not what I wanted! Seems that the problem is the gold gellified sparks… either I have to make it thicker to it doesn’t break in such little parts that kinda mixes with the gel… So… the next logical step was to avoid the gold sparks. I made a gel and added only pink sparks with hemp oil and some tocoferolo. This looks better!!! The gel even with bubbles is transparent and you can see the suspended sparks looking good!