What is soaping?
Soaping happens when you rub a lotion into the skin and it creates a white cast. It causes you to keep rubbing and rubbing until the lotion finally decides to fade away and finally your skin is clear of all that whiteness. Overall this really isn’t an issue. It doesn’t mean your lotion isn’t absorbing into the skin. It doesn’t mean your lotion is unstable. It does not mean your lotion won’t moisturize, hydrate, and protect your skin. All that is happening is air is now being introduced into the lotion as you are rubbing it on the skin and it causes micro foam. But this can be annoying because now you are stuck rubbing in this lotion for minutes rather than just rubbing it on real fast and moving on with your day. Also, if you are selling your lotion, you will notice consumers do not like this. They want it to disappear immediately into their skin or else they think it’s a “bad” lotion.
Soaping happens more commonly with “Natural” lotions. This is because we have to use a higher amount of emulsifiers to keep our oil and water mixed together. Compared to the traditional “non natural” emulsifiers we used a lot in the past. So the more emulsifier you add to the formula, the more micro foam you might have to deal with.
I asked Google AI “How to Reduce Soaping in Lotions” & here were it’s suggestions….
“Try adding in 0.5-1% dimethicone.”
“Increase slip by adding in Dimethicone“
“Use fatty esters: replace fatty alcohols with Kester Wax K-48, K-56, or K-59”
“Use non-ionic emulsifiers: Try using a non-ionic emulsifier like polawax, emulsifying wax, or lotion-to 165”
“Use cationic emulsifiers: try using a cationic emulsifier like BTMS 50
“Decrease the emulsifier and wax concentration: too much emulsifier can cause a white trace to appear when spreading the product on the skin”
“Leave out gums and fatty alcohols: these ingredients can worsen the soaping effect by creating dray on the skin”
“Add a low HLB emulsifiers: try adding a low HLB emulsifier live Olivem 900 “
In the video version of this post I experimented with all of these methods, so if you want to watch that, you can click here. But in this post, I just want to talk about the methods that worked best.
How to Reduce Soaping in Lotions
Add in 0.5%-1% Dimethicone. Increasing slip can help reduce soaping.
Use a non-ionic Emulsifier. (When I switched BTM 50 to Emulsifying Wax NF in my formula it soaped a lot less)
Use less emulsifier. The more emulsifier you use the more likely you are to get soaping. You can also try reducing the fatty alcohol or fatty acid.
Adding in a low HLB emulsifier.
Examples of low HLB emulsifiers;
Olivem 900 MB (INCI: Sorbitan Olivate) HLB: 4.7 (accepted as “Natural”)
Glyceryl Stearate HLB: 3.6 (accepted as “Natural”)
Sorbitan Stearate HLB: 4.7 (Made synthetically in lab. Google might say it’s natural, but with more research you will see it’s not)
Polyglyceryl-3 Oleate HLB: Can’t find, but it says low HLB everywhere that sells it. (accepted as “Natural”)
Glyceryl Oleate HLB: 3-5 (accepted as “Natural”)
Sorbitan Oleate HLB: 4.3 (accepted as “Natural”)
Polyglyceryl-4 oleate HLB: 5 (accepted as “Natural”)
Sources mentioned in video;
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