What preservative do you use!?!?! And why!

Phenonip, germaben or optiphen ? Which is better ???? HELPPPP

sugar & oats

I make scrubs and body butters and use Optiphen or Germaben. I can't tell you which is better as those are the only two I've used and they are different applications. Sorry!

Have you read the product information on Susan's blog?

I use Phenonip in scrubs and body butters. I like Germall Plus liquid in lotions, body washes, shampoos, liquid dish detergent etc.

Sugar & Oats, I mean this in the kindest way. Please visit your library and take out a few books on soap and cosmetic making. Visit SoapQueen.com and start reading/watching tutorials. Read through the thousands of old posts on this forum, you haven't asked a question yet that doesn't come up near weekly and the responses in those older posts will answer most of your questions without you having to wait for new responses. You're asking a lot of very basic questions that are covered well in most teaching based resources. You mentioned that you're starting a business but I strongly recommend putting that on hold until next year. Do the research first (soap and cosmetics are much more complicated than they may seem), make some gifts for the holidays and then start developing and testing products before seriously considering a bath & body business. Then when you're truly ready, best of luck! It's hard work but immensely rewarding if it's indeed right for you.

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I've been making soap for years ..... I mean this in the kindest way as well isn't this a blog for people that have questions go instead of googling every thing? I'm sorry if my question insulted you it was a basic question and I wanted everyone's opinions bc I don't like using preservatives..... thx

sugar & oats

Oh no, I'm not insulted. It's just that the questions you're asking are very common of beginners. It's totally acceptable to ask questions but I'm just suggesting to do some searching, a lot of the information you're asking about comes up very frequently here and many topics have been discussed, in depth, over several months (and years) within the same thread. Could save you a lot of time and frustration waiting for new replies.

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You have to use the correct preservative for the type of product you're making. Look up the different types to see what suits what you are planning to do. Lotioncrafter.com has a lot of good info on preservatives. making a correctly balanced and well preserved lotion is tricky.

I have experimented with a couple of 'natural' preservatives - grapefruit seed extract and alcohol. The lotions were fine under some conditions, if certain essential oils were used in the lotion (at low concentration), and if the temperature was not too high. I suppose one could devise a combination of essential oils and GSE or/and alcohol - and tell the customer to keep the lotion refrigerated - with an expiration date. I actually have customers asking me to do this. It is not impossible, but it would be such an amount of work that I politely refuse, and gave up that part of the business.

Also, there have been concerns on solvent residues in the extraction of grape seed extract, so not all 'natural' is benign, or truly natural. Alcohol needs to be used at a high enough concentration, so that brings its own set of problems.

I read the MSDA (Materials safety data sheet) for one of the germalls which I bought and did not like it, so I decided to do without. To me this means no more water/oil emulsions, so no lotions. Once you mix water and oil, bacteria, fungi and molds like to live in it.

Now I just make solid lotions or salves, they work great and require no preservatives. This is now all I use myself. They do not sell as well as the lotions, but they do sell. Anhydrous products are ok without a preservative, but you can get rancidity depending on the oils, different story, vit E can help there.

Since you are thinking about a business, I will also say that another reason I dropped the lotion making, was that I had to work 4 times longer for a dollar than when making soap.

I use germaben II E in my creams and butters. Its made for formulas with at least 25% oils and I like thick creams instead of thinner lotions.

green soap said:

Anhydrous products are ok without a preservative

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Only if there's no chance of them coming in contact with water with reasonable use.

Thank you

sugar & oats

@green soap that's why I have stuck to soap making thats what I like to do and what I'm best at I've made my own lotions out of butters but that's about it ..... but if I could create something that has no or less chemicals then the crap you buy at the stores it sounds great to me!!! Thank you everybody for your time very much so appreciated

sugar & oats

Keep in mind that GSE is an antioxidant so it will only slow down rancidity. You can buy test kits to test your lotions and I really recommend that you do that. Especially if you are going to try and go preservative free. It will tell the story for you without me, or anyone else going on about it.

I use Germall Plus powder and I also Geoguard which is an ecocert product.

I use leucidil from lotioncrafter. It is considered natural and is an effective anti microbial. It's made from fermented radishes. Look it up on their website. I've been using it in lotions for a couple of years now with great success.


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Fortunately the search tool here made this one fairly easy. That's not always the case! I pulled down "advanced search" from the menu, key word "preservative", and selected "titles only":

http://www.soapmakingforum.com/search.php?searchid=341560

You can repeat that with other words such as "preserve" in the key word's place.

However, I am frequently frustrated with discussion boards because it's not always easy to get meaningful results either that way or with external search tools like Google. One board I use having to do with sports officiating has a moderator who prefers to close threads once they get old, which increases the proliferation of threads on the same subject and makes it harder to one-stop-shop them. On some boards very old threads brought up by new posts are disparaged as zombie threads; I think the people who think that way just aren't into the archival nature of materials and discussions, in some cases because they're uncomfortable with controversy (which occurs in some subjects) and hence like subjects to be "laid to rest".

dagmar88 said:

Only if there's no chance of them coming in contact with water with reasonable use.

Click to expand...

Actually even then, if it's a material that excludes water, mere contact with water won't cause spoilage.

I've been very happy with Geoguard and NeoDefend. Neither contains parabens nor formaldehyde releasers, and like Lindy says, the former is an ECOCERT product.

Lindy's correct about GSE not being a preservative but an antioxidant. Ditto with ROE.

Thank you everybody I will check out and see what @sallysoap said tho....

sugar & oats