High-quality hair and skin care products must offer numerous properties to be successful. For example, they need to be easily spreadable on the skin and feel pleasant. Silicones make this possible. With their highly flexible silicone chains, they ensure good and even product distribution and lend skin and hair a pleasantly smooth and soft feel.
Good examples of these are Wacker-Belsil® dimethicones and amodimethicones. They significantly improve shampoo distribution and hair softness. For skin care, WACKER offers numerous Wacker-Belsil® silicone waxes with various melting points. Waxes with low melting points allow, for example, the formulation of easy-to-spread emulsions. High-melting, alkyl-modified silicones form a protective, moisturizing film on the skin and lend a soft feel.
Good hold and combability play important roles in hair care and are ideally facilitated by silicones. The new hybrid silicone polymer Wacker-Belsil® P101, for example, couples flexible silicone molecules with organic polymer blocks. It allows the formulation of hairsprays with good flexibility, high curl retention and short drying times that nevertheless give hair outstanding softness. What’s more, Wacker-Belsil® DM and ADM polymers impart excellent combability. They reduce friction by up to 78 %. This way, hair is easily combed right after washing, too.
Silicones are perfect shine optimizers and color-brilliance intensifiers. They form a thin film on hair, skin and lips and thereby create a smooth and shiny surface. These properties are in particularly great demand for lipsticks. Silicones with a high refractive index, such as Wacker-Belsil® PDM 1000 and Wacker-Belsil® SPR 45 VP, enhance shine and are especially suitable for formulating kiss-proof lipsticks. Silicones such as Wacker-Belsil® RG 100 silicone resin gel make lipsticks and sun lotions more resistant to water and oils. Moreover, they reduce pigment transfer in decorative cosmetics.
Cyclodextrins Protect Sensitive Active Ingredients
Organic cosmetic actives today fulfill important functions in skin and hair care. However, they can be very sensitive to oxygen, light and heat, and can rapidly evaporate. This problem can be solved by using innovative cyclodextrin complexes from WACKER. The ring-shaped sugar molecules are able to encapsulate active ingredients like a cage. In doing so, they protect molecules against oxidation and evaporation. At the same time, they can also release the active ingredient to the skin at a controlled rate.
Ready-to-use cyclodextrin complexes can be obtained as CAVAMAX® W6/ linoleic acid complex and CAVAMAX® W7/tea tree oil complex. Furthermore, WACKER also offers cyclodextrin complexes for retinol and tocopherol (vitamins A and E).
WACKER’s amino acid L-cysteine serves a protective function – this time for the skin itself. They stop free radicals (byproducts of cell metabolism) from damaging cells. L-cysteine is thus primarily suitable for formulating anti-aging products.
Easy on Hair: Cysteine for Perms
Preventing negative side effects is a feature of many WACKER products. Take, for example, perms. Many perm formulas have an unpleasant pungent odor and are relatively aggressive. This is not the case with WACKER’s L-cysteine. The naturally occurring amino acid is easy on hair and lends the perming agent a pleasant, non-pungent smell.
Unlike conventional preparations, L-cysteine is a purely vegetarian-grade product. It is fermented instead of being made from feathers, boar bristles or human hair. In fact, WACKER is the only manufacturer worldwide to produce highly pure cysteine via the fermentation of vegetarian-grade raw materials in biotech processes.
Visit WACKER at Intercharm in hall 7, booth 7.