Earlier this month, Lubrizol Beauty, the Beauty business team at The Lubrizol Corporation, a chemical company that provides specialty chemicals for the industrial and consumer markets like cosmetics and personal care products, introduced a newly released polymer for cleansing formulation manufacturing. The new polymer, Carbopol SC-800, is designed for mild and sulfate-free product formulations, is the latest release from the company who “partners with customers and industry leaders to deliver a beautiful skin experience, providing consumers with trending solutions, substantiated benefits and superior sensory enjoyment,” said Jessica Becker, Global Skin Cleansing Market Manager at LLS Beauty.
To learn more about Carbopol SC-800 Polymer, including background information about the research, development, and formulation process, the industry pain points this new polymer release can potentially solve for manufacturers and suppliers of personal care products, and Lubrizol Beauty’s plans for further innovation and development using this ingredient technology, CosmeticsDesign spoke to Becker for her insights.
Formulating & launching Carbopol SC-800 Polymer
When the Lubrizol Beauty applications team began developing a new polymer for personal beauty product formulation, researchers focused on “a strong need we heard from our customers in the market for skin cleansing,” said Becker. “In the skin cleansing market,” she shared further, “we saw a need for clarity, suspension and thickening in a wide range of challenging surfactant systems.” Therefore, it was the Lubrizol Beauty applications team’s goal to “optimize Carbopol SC-800 polymer to offer all the benefits expected in low pH, mild amino acid surfactants, and soap-based formulas.”
When developing Carbopol SC-800, the team focused on previous research and development as a foundation for the new ingredient formulation. “Having a rheology modifier that could offer thickening, suspension and clarity in the most challenging conditions,” Becker explained, “our applications team was able to work closely with synthesis to test many variations which helped us to land on the best Carbopol chemistry for these formulations.”
“When we developed Carbopol SC-800 polymer,” she added, “we utilized our rheology modifier synthesis expertise to modify this grade of Carbopol polymer to have the best compatibility with mild amino acid-based sulfate free surfactant and soap-based formulations” to best meet consumer skin cleansing needs.
Further, she shared, “when Carbopol SC-800 was designed we wanted to offer more efficient dispersion compared to other traditional Carbopol polymer grades like, Carbopol SC-200 polymer.” This is especially significant as the improved “efficiency with dispersion will help with energy saving and streamline manufacturing processes, making it effective for our customers to use a powder in skin cleansing formulations” and increasing the ingredient’s potential versatility for formulators.
Next steps
Following the successful completion and release of Carbopol SC-800, Lubrizol Beauty is “already working on how else the polymer can benefit the skin cleansing market in additional types of formulations,” Becker confirmed. The applications team is “constantly creating new market trending formulations and making new discoveries with this technology and is now exploring compatibility to stabilize oils in cleansing systems using this polymer with good initial success to help create more moisturizing cleansing formulations,” she added.
Moving forward, she concluded, “cleansing systems are diverse, so as we engage with the market, we will assess Carbopol SC-800 polymer in additional systems to map the rheology it can provide to enable the best-in-class formulations for our customers.”