An aside: Let's talk about drier feeling oils...

A few people have asked me about astringent oils lately, and the main question is "are they drying?"

Allow me to recap a post from last year with a bit more detail...


An astringent is actually defined as "chemical that tends to shrink or constrict body tissues, usually locally after topical medicinal application." By definition an astringent isn't necessarily a drying thing, but we do perceive moisturizing ingredients with astringent qualities as drying. These more astringent oils and butters still moisturize well, but they will give you the perception of being drier than regular oils.

Let's take something like mango butter, considered a dry or astringent butter. The tannins in the butter may make it feel astringent, and it may "shrink or constrict" your skin, but the fatty acids and phytosterols are still offering amazing moisturizing qualities, so you are still getting a nicely moisturizing creation!

If you take a look at non-oil based astringents, like alcohol or witch hazel, these can be drying because they don't contain all the lovely emollients we find in our esters, oils, and butters. (This is one of the reasons that cetyl alcohol isn't drying - it might be an alcohol by chemical definition, but it's a fatty alcohol, so it has that fatty or emollient part on it, which overcomes the drying possibilities of the alcohol part!) Witch hazel is less astringent and drying than alcohol, and can actually offer some moisturizing features for oily skin (click on the post to learn more).

Let's say you want to use an astringent butter or oil on dry hair or skin, will it still moisturize? Of course it will, because it contains all those lovely fatty acids. If you use an ester on dry hair or skin, will it still moisturize? Yep, because it's still an emollient. The chemistry of our drier feeling or astringent oils and butters means it feels drier but it will still behave as an emollient moisturizer that will do all the great things the non-astringent feeling butters, oils, and esters!

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Question: How to use polysorbates in our products?

Shana writes to me: I was reading one of your old blogs about water soluble oils and you stated this: "There are two ways to make water soluble oils - you can mix an oil with an emulsifier (usually polysorbate 80) to make an oil water soluble" You did not explain how to do this exactly. Could you elaborate more on how you would do this, please?

We can use polysorbate 20 or polysorbate 80 to help solubilize oil soluble ingredients in water based products. Each has their own reason for being - polysorbate 20 is good for essential or fragrance oils and polysorbate 80 is good for carrier oils.

Here's how I use them. I mix equal parts of the polysorbate with the oil in question and mix it well. Then I add it to my product. So let's say I'm making a d-Limonene based cleanser for my hands and I want to incorporate the oil soluble d-Limonene into my product. I mix equal parts d-Limonene and polysorbate 20 in a plastic shot glass or small container - mix it very well - then pour that into my product and mix well. That's pretty much it. The hard part is figuring out how much you need to keep the oils solubilized in the product.

As a general rule, you'll want to use 1 part polysorbate 20 with 1 part of the fragrance oil, but this can lead to cloudy mixtures. If you want it to be clear, you'll have to play with the amount of the polysorbate 20 you use. Since I'm really not that picky about a product being clear, I just use the 1:1 ratio.

The same process is used for polysorbate 80. Again, you might get a cloudy product with a 1:1 ratio, so you'll have to play with the amounts if you want something clear. I'm that worried about it as long as it remains solubilized.

As a note, you can use polysorbate 80 in place of polysorbate 20 but the opposite doesn't work!

Click here for more ideas on using polysorbates in your products.

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