Here you can find out why
- liquid paraffins and mineral oils are an inexpensive basis for white creams
- Dyes in white petroleum jelly need to be chemically bleached
- Mineral oils do not contain any minerals, vitamins or nutrients
- Cosmetics with vegetable oils must retain their individual color and
- what actually makes the most famous German care cream so white
In order to produce a pure white cream, you need above all colorless fats and the remaining coloring is chemically bleached out
So I had to choose between adding natural oils and ingredients or white color, which can only be like that if I had avoided using native vegetable oils.
Classic mineral oils such as liquid paraffin are clear, colorless, odorless and tasteless liquids that contain no minerals, vitamins or nutrients and are used as a (cheaper) carrier for many cosmetic products. They consist of large, long-chain molecules that cannot be absorbed by the skin, and other ingredients with a caring effect cannot penetrate the skin.
It is the dissolved colorless Fat molecules that make a cream – like our drinking milk, by the way – appear white because they scatter incident light particularly strongly.
Why my serum can't be white
Synthetic oil components enable pure white creams - natural vegetable fats from fruits and seeds usually have their own color due to the plant components they contain, ranging from orange (e.g. the beta-carotene contained in sea buckthorn fruit), yellow (e.g. argan oil fruits) to brown-green (tamanu fruit). are sufficient. Because natural oils are fats with native qualities such as olive oil, they bring with them a more or less pronounced smell of their own and, as already mentioned, can also visibly shape the color of the end product. Incidentally, this also applies to each batch produced, which has an individual color depending on the harvest and cultivation area. It was clear to me that these are factors that make it difficult for customers and dealers to gain a high degree of market acceptance. but
From a cosmetic point of view, natural oils are the more valuable raw materials for skin-physiologically sensible care:
They are the true anti-aging factors and can regulate and stabilize a skin condition. The natural argan, algae and tamanu oil contained in my body serum gives the skin moisturizing linoleic acid, nourishing choline, flavonoids and tocopherols, which serve as free radical scavengers, through their analogy to the skin's own fats. They can be split and broken down by the skin's own enzymes and are thus integrated into the skin's metabolism. I would never have considered sacrificing these valuable properties for a market advantage such as white optics.
Knowing this, you should also remember that "white" does not always have to mean "pure" and "good".
Digression on the most well-known white skin cream:
Probably the best-known white skin cream owes its name to the Latin word Niveus, which means snow-white. The founder of the world-famous Nivea brand, the pharmacist and Beiersdorf buyer Oscar Troplowitz, made his famous white cream from water, oil (Vaseline) and Eucerit as an emulsifier with great success. Eucerit was invented for him by the German chemist Isaac Lifschütz, and it was the first water-in-oil emulsifier available for industrial production in large quantities and cheaply. It is made from sheep's wool wax.
Troplowitz acquired the patent rights for a "process for the production of highly water-absorbent ointment bases" by combining Eucerit with paraffins, the ointment base Eucerin was created, into which large amounts of water could be worked and which therefore became the basis of an all-purpose cream. The Nivea formulation therefore mainly consists of water, alkanes (mineral oils), glycerin, dexpanthenol, citric acid, fragrances and, as an essential component, the emulsifier Eucerit.
Vaseline consists of residues from petroleum distillation, is a solid form of liquid paraffin (petroleum-based ointment) and is originally yellow. These residues are cleaned by adding sulfuric acid, activated charcoal and fuller's earth to obtain the white petroleum jelly that we use in cosmetics and medical products.
Like all petroleum products, paraffin has no real added health value for the skin. Vaseline only lays on the skin and the skin area becomes impermeable to air and water. This leads to a build-up of moisture in the skin. Vaseline has again come into focus because Korean women use this property in a night mask, in which they apply Vaseline over their face cream and care products (slugging) to better channel active ingredients into the skin through the increased water supply.
Here you will also find out:
Why my serum uses a plant-based emulsifier
Why my serum isn't creamy greasy
Why my serum is healthy