Today we want to talk to you about a topic which is never touched upon in the world of natural skincare – the fact that you might be buying contaminated hydrosols when you shop for ingredients for your artisan skincare business. We don’t want to sound alarmist, but unfortunately we have found a general unwillingness amongst many producers, suppliers and consumers alike to address the fact that it is very important that your extracts and hydrosols are preserved correctly at source.<\/p>\n
You have undoubtedly been told that your unpreserved hydrosol has a shelf life of e.g. 3-6\u00a0months as long as it is kept in the fridge. This is true –\u00a0as long as the hydrosol isn’t opened or used after bottling at source.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n There is a rising trend in the cosmetic ingredients\u00a0industry to produce unpreserved hydrosols and hydroglyceric extracts. This trend sounds\u00a0appealing for\u00a0anyone who wants to make natural skincare – after all, it means you can incorporate lovely botanical extracts without having to incorporate synthetic preservatives. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When prepared by the mainstream ingredients industry, hydrosols and extracts are prepared in state-of-the-art premises under extremely hygienic conditions in line with\u00a0Good Manufacturing Practice\u00a0compliance. These hydrosols \/ extracts\u00a0are then pasteurized and filled in original disinfected or sterilized containers. The overhead (the air above the hydrosol \/ extract) is filled with an inert gas such as nitrogen to lock out any air and oxygen.<\/span><\/p>\n The\u00a0containers used to hold the hydrosols should\u00a0remain intact and free of contamination, when closed and sealed in their original containers and stored under appropriate conditions for up to 6 months (in rare cases up to one year).\u00a0<\/span>These containers are drums of 5-50 kg (depending on the market demand and the nature of the extract or hydrosol).<\/span><\/p>\n This is an excellent opportunity for a formulator in a large-scale manufacturing factory to use unpreserved ingredients. Normally when you buy extracts, they come ready preserved. And if you’ve spent your time hunting around to try and find suitable extracts for your organic skincare brand, then you will know that most of them contain strong synthetic preservatives which generally won’t fit your formulation\u00a0ethos.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Now you can see why buying unpreserved hydrosols and extracts offers such a great opportunity for you as a formulator. Imagine\u00a0you\u2019re a formulator and are using 5-10 hydrosols or\u00a0extracts together with other water containing additives. All of a sudden, you might find yourself dealing with 10 different preservative systems in the final product if each of these extracts was already preserved when you bought them.<\/p>\n Can you imagine what a headache it would be during product development, routine quality control and stability testing to:<\/span><\/p>\n You can now see\u00a0what a blessing it is for\u00a0a formulator to be able to skip all of these time consuming steps when using unpreserved hydrosols and extracts.<\/span><\/p>\n Now imagine that you’re\u00a0making a formulation which contains somewhere between\u00a010-50% of a hydrosol\u00a0and 1% of each extract. If you’re making a batch size of 5 tonnes (which is not even a large batch in the industry), then you or your production assistant will open a 50kg drum and add the entire content to your batch, which is then immediately preserved. This is simple and comes without any complications.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n However, when you work as an artisan, buy your ingredients in 100g – 5kg batches and work with small manufacturing quantities, then this won’t be the case for you. Your ingredients retailer then purchases the unpreserved drums of hydrosols \/ extracts, which according to the original manufacturer has a shelf life of 6 months to 1 year when kept in the original container.<\/p>\n Your retailer opens these drums and refills them in (hopefully) disinfected bottles. To add insult to injury, they\u00a0don’t always operate under clean room and extremely hygienic conditions. As soon as the original drum of hydrosol \/ extract is opened, the content is exposed to air and contamination.<\/p>\n Your supplier then\u00a0passes the original data sheet (which specifies that the hydrosol is ‘free of contamination’) to you and gives you the original manufacturer’s guidelines. These guidelines tell you that your hydrosol \/ extract is free of contaminants for 6 months when the original bottle is kept in a fridge. This advice is of course only valid for the sealed original drums but\u00a0does not apply to the refills that the retailer is selling to you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We have received\u00a0an alarming number of reports of contaminated hydrosols from our students over the last year, who have microtested their unpreserved hydrosols and extracts as they arrive and found that they’re already contaminated on arrival. Their suppliers have told them that their hydrosols and extracts have a shelf life of at least 6 months if the bottle is kept in the fridge. However, this advice may not be applicable to the refills that their retailers are\u00a0selling them.<\/span><\/p>\nAre you buying unpreserved contaminated hydrosols for your #skincare formulations? <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n The issue of unpreserved or contaminated\u00a0hydrosols features widely in the tutor questions we receive from\u00a0Formula Botanica students on our Certificate in Natural Cosmetic Preservation<\/a> and Certificate in Cosmetic Stability Testing<\/a>.\u00a0Our students often ask us the question: my hydrosol or extract is contaminated. Can I add a preservative to it and still use the hydrosol?<\/span><\/p>\n Preservatives are added to cosmetic products and raw materials to avoid contamination. Any addition of a preservative after contamination has occurred is not completely effective. Even if the addition of the preservative could kill the microorganisms\u00a0in the raw material or in the finished products, it doesn\u2019t completely eliminate their endotoxins and by-products of the interaction between the preservative and contaminants. In the very best case, these\u00a0by-products will have a negative impact on the stability of the product. They may even cause physical harm to the consumer.<\/span><\/p>\n As tempting as it is to buy an unpreserved hydrosol or extract when you’re an artisan formulator, we recommend that you avoid buying unpreserved hydrosols and extracts in refill bottles.\u00a0These hydrosols or extracts are very probably already contaminated when\u00a0you receive them. Our recommendation is always to purchase preserved hydrosols and extracts unless these are in original sealed drums and not in refill bottles.<\/span><\/p>\n Other articles to read on this topic:<\/p>\nHow are hydrosols packaged at source by cosmetic manufacturers?<\/h2>\n
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Are retailers selling you contaminated hydrosols?<\/h2>\n
Can you preserve contaminated hydrosols?<\/h2>\n
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