The need for application-specific material substrates in consumer care

Airit Agasty

Croda Europe

Techspace One, Sci-Tech, Keckwick lane, Daresbury, Cheshire, WA4 4AB, United Kingdom

Active ingredient characterisation for personal care formulations is key to determining the benefit obtained in an application. Depending upon the type of application, different characterisation techniques require the use of substrates such as hair or wool fibres in haircare and artificial skins and skin mimics for skincare. While the use of these substrates for the purpose of lab characterisation is prevalent due to their low cost (in some cases) and ease of availability, they can be very challenging and cumbersome to handle and can lead to significant discrepancies in results. For this reason, it is essential to design substrates better suited for the purpose of consumer care ingredient testing. The designed material should have benefits that are more correlatable to real substrates of skin and hair – such as active absorption, and cleansing properties, and be used for different testing methods, such as physical scrubbing to chemical spectroscopies. Cost effective and readily available material solutions designed to help characterise consumer care formulation ingredients will solve an essential problem exiting in today’s market.