Pam asks: How important is to test the ph? In other words if I were to use an established recipe that had already been formulated then wouldn't the ph have been taken into consideration? Another reason for asking is the cost.
Testing your pH is a good thing, but if you're using recipes from suppliers' sites or blogs that you know to be good ones, they've taken that into account. You don't generally need to worry about lotions - most of the ingredients are pH neutral (like oils) or in the right range (like proteins, panthenol, preservatives, and so on).
If you have a surfactant based recipe and you decide to switch out the surfactants, you'll want to make sure you take the pH into consideration if there's a big difference - say something like DLS mild to decyl glucoside - and alter it. You don't need to own a pH meter - I'm just excited I got one for Christmas and have been trying it with everything - but you do need to think about it when using certain ingredients.
The other thing that came up this week was this website - Lotion Secret's Harmful Ingredient Glossary. I'm not really sure where to start with this website, which deserves to be in the Trifecta of Argh Hall of Fame, but I think the line about glycerin possibly being derived from liposuction fat was the one that pushed me over the edge. The fact that most of our bottles of glycerin are labelled as vegetable derived just shows me how little she knows about this topic. (She also sells her own stuff, which doesn't contain any of these awful things or any broad spectrum preservatives, so again, take the information with a grain of salt.) And don't get me started on her definition of occlusion (For the record, it is not like wrapping your skin in plastic so it can't breathe!)
As a note, I'm not saying all the information presented on that web page is wrong, just that there's so much that is wrong, misquoted, or misinterpreted, it's hard to read it for what might be right.
So that's it for today! Join me tomorrow for something else...not sure what yet. It's going to be another busy day, then we have our youth group tonight for "Fun with Fleece", so I'll have to see what ends up in the mailbag tomorrow morning!
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