Formulating with Food - Is That Even Doable?
Wouldn't it be great if we could safely extract and capture the very essence of a fresh vegetable or fruit and use it in a skin care product without needing any pricey lab equipment?
It is possible.
But.
There are things to consider, and other things to be aware of.
To answer a few questions you've posed me about formulating with 'real, natural food', I decided to make a product using one of my favorite ingredients - cucumber.
Going Roots With Cucumber
I chose cucumber for this experiment because my skin loves cucumber - in seemingly every form. Cucumber extract and cucumber seed oil are staples in my stock. Fresh cucumber juice is my first choice for almost every face mask.Deciding to create a soothing, fresh-cucumber eye serum (or 2) took me about a nanosecond and a half.
Juicing
I made 2 different cucumber juices to discover what worked best: with or without peel.My preferred cucumber juicing method: grate cucumber into a lined sieve and allow it to strain.
The sieve was lined with 4-double silk jersey (I used an old silk t-shirt, but might just as well have used doubled up nylon stocking or muslin cloth).
When using cucumber juice in a mask, the mixture is squeezed to extract all the juice. This time, I wanted the juice as clear as possible, so there was no squeezing or pressing of the material.
After straining, both juices were filtered an additional 6 times through coffee filters.
Why 6 times? Why not 2 or 20?
One reason only: I stopped filtering when there was no visible residue in the filter.
The top picture is the batch with the peel included (prior to the final filterings), the bottom picture is the peeled cucumber batch after filterings.
The difference in the juice color is huge, don't you agree?
Preserving
Both batches were preserved immediately after straining. Broad spectrum preservation is an absolute must with a formula of this nature.Normally, I would reach for my never-fail cocktail of ethylparaben, methylparaben and phenoexethynol. However, it is normally added during the water-phase of an emulsion (read: to a heated mixture).
This eye serum is a cold-mix formula, and since benzyl alcohol is added at cool-down, it was used for both batches.
The Formula
2 Identical batches were made where the only difference was the cucumber juice.Additional ingredients were
- aloe vera juice
- cucumber extract (because we can't get enough cucumber, can we?),
- glycerine
- hyaluronic acid
- benzyl alcohol
How did all this get serum-y? Hyaluronic acid thickens liquid just enough to make the perfect gel-ish, serum-y viscosity for an eye serum. No need of a separate gelling agent (how cool is it when an active ingredient doubles as a thickener?)
Next Up
Next time, we'll have a peek at how the eye serums turned out, how the cucumber behaved and if there any surprises.Hint: of course there were surprises-- one can't do something like this without experiencing a few surprises.
Comments
I like this form because I can prepare it with the seasonal food when they are nice and ripe.