Personal Care Product Formulations: Basics and Industrial Challenges (G. Chiti)

The mass production of personal care formulations poses several technical and industrial challenges.

Current market trends request body showers, liquid soaps, shampoos or intimate hygiene products to be milder and less irritating to sensitive skins and to be more sustainable towards the environment, by containing biodegradable, natural or plant derived surfactants and ingredients. The rheological properties of such products should also be fine tuned in order to meet customer expectations, without the use of expensive or poorly biodegradable polymer based thickening ingredients. In addiction formulators are continuously seeing a reduction of the palette, as well as the amount, of the permitted preservatives to protect the products against microbial and mould contamination. This turns out in the need of designing robust industrial manufacturing processes, by exploiting multi-stage water purification, optimisation of liquid drainages and effective sanitisation strategies (e.g. with steam sterilisation rather than chemical sanitisation).

The manufacture of deodorants and antiperspirants, on the other hand, is usually much easier from a microbiological point of view as they contains components with intended or ancillary antimicrobial or enzyme deviation properties. Nevertheless their industrial scale production poses several challenges in terms of use of flammable components (alcohols) or propellants (LPGs), the handling of anhydrous formulations and the stabilisation of suspension of insoluble actives (e.g. aluminium salts, organic absorbents, etc.).