Abstract
Development and design of sustainable cosmetic products is a key R&D priority across all the cosmetic and personal care companies. This is primarily due to the focus on addressing the strong consumer driver for cosmetic products that do not have a negative environmental footprint. This has led to the rapid development of new formulations where traditional ingredients such as synthetic surfactants, polymers, silicone oils etc are being replaced by more sustainable alternatives such as biosurfactants, biobased surfactants, biopolymers, natural oils. This replacement of traditional ingredients by more sustainable alternatives however is not trivial as re-building the performance of traditional ingredients is highly challenging. This is specifically true of oil-in-water and water-in-oil based emulsion systems which constitute a large majority of cosmetic products. The stability, texture/rheology/sensory has to be re-engineered in these sustainable formulations. This re-engineering of the formulations however does additionally present opportunities to build in new performance attributes and to additionally engineeer in smart or stimuli responsive behavior.This study will report on the formulation design of several novel sustainable emulsion systems-a thermo-responsive whey protein/chitosan oil-in-water emulsion system, a glycolipid/silica particle water-in-oil emulsion system, a thermo-responsive methylcellulose/chitosan hydrogel system incorporating an EGF (epidermal growth factor). The ability to tune the rheology and rheological response to external stimuli to deliver performance benefits will be illustrated.