Ensuring that products remain stable, safe and suitable for use on skin is a highly important consideration for cosmetics manufacturers and the decision on how to preserve a product now requires searching through an increasingly wide range of ingredients.
Key to this are ingredients that support claims within new trends for milder cosmetics. Richard Scott spoke to Daniel Winn, business director of Philadelphia-based specialty chemical company, Inolex, to discover more about alternative preservation.
PC: Inolex produces “Preservation Systems”. Could you explain how these ingredients work as a system?
DW: We start with the “hurdle” technology, which is a concept developed by the food industry in the 1960s, or perhaps even earlier, whereby we use multiple hurdles to make it difficult for microorganisms to live. We have various microorganisms in the cosmetics microbial challenge criteria that need to be addressed. There are four or more microorganisms that are important: Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, yeast, and fungus. There are different hurdles that exist for each microorganism to thrive. In a sense, that is why a system is necessary – to create the right hurdles for each of the specific microorganisms.
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