In My Soap Pot My Formula Botanica Final Project

This is my experience of doing the final project of my Diploma of Organic Skincare Formulation with Formula Botanica. It’s a two year course, but you can do it in one year, if you can spend more time on studying than I did. I dedicated one full day to practicing formulating and spend some more time during the week and weekends for studying. In case you missed the first part, you can find it here.

In the last part I shared my first formulation of the Soapmakers Hand Cream, version 1.1. Here’s what happened when I tried making it.

From my notes:

22/7/22: First attempt of full formulation (including all the additives, but without the essential oils). Struggled with adding the colloidal oatmeal to the cream. Adding it directly, results in undissolved clumps in cream, which were difficult to remove even under high shear with the little mixer. Tried again with simple cream formulations (just water, oil and emulsifier) to find out the right way of adding colloidal oatmeal. Tried adding it to the still warm emulsion, which also didn’t work.

First attempt: added the powder directly to the emulsion at cool down phase

Then tried dissolving it in a little water first, which seems to do the trick. The oats are soluble in water. Next attempt: dissolve completely in water first and then add to emulsion. Since it’s not heat-sensitive, I added it to the emulsion while still hot, right after combining the oil and water phases. I hope this will make sure that the compounds are well-incorporated into the emulsion (= emulsion stability).

The correct way: dissolving the colloidal oatmeal in water before adding it to the still-warm emulsion directly after combining the oil and water phases

The key to adding colloidal oatmeal to emulsions is to dissolve it in water first (I used cold water), and then add the oat-water to the emulsion right after combining the oil and water phases. This results in a smooth emulsion without lumps (Note in the picture the cream is not lumpy, but has air bubbles in it because I accidentally lifted the head of the mini-mixer out of the emulsion and now it has air in it).

Now that I figured out how to incorporate the oats into the emulsion, most of my next attempts was to improve the feel of the cream, and that was quite a mission!