Polysorbate Debate

Have you ever looked at the ingredients of a product and wondered what all of the things were? Well today you will get to know a little more about one of those ingredients, polysorbate-20, 40, 60 or 80.

In my quest to make an aftershave I had to find an emulsifier to use. For those of you that don't know what an emulsifier is, simply put it is a compound that allows for oil and water to mix, somewhat. If you look at soap making websites you will find all sorts of different emulsifiers to use in your products.

I wanted to find an emulsifier that I could make at home or already had around. I had some beeswax and had seen beeswax as an emulsifier, but it also needed Borax. So I tried that and it didn't work so well. What I was missing was the fact that this was normally used with an oil base and mine was water based. So I had to look at other options that I would have to buy.

I noticed that a lot of the products that I use everyday have some sort of polysorbate in them and polysorbate was also on a lot of websites for soap making. So I decided to do a little investigating.

First was to figure out which one of the polysorbates that I needed to use. As I looked around it seemed that the more complex the oils the larger the number you wanted. For example, olive oil would probably require polysorbate-80 where some lighter essential oils would only need polysorbate-20. I had already tried the beeswax, which would be more complex, and I had added olive oil. So I decided to use polysorbate-80.

As I did my research I came across a forum where someone had posted a concern about polysorbates and the byproducts of their production. Further comments showed that the concern had come from a book that was at least 17 years old, but I decided to investigate a little more. As I looked I found a study performed by the Japanese government.

http://www.fsc.go.jp/english/evaluationreports/foodadditive/polysorbate_report.pdf

Doing some reading I also found that a lot of food products even use different polysorbates. The fact that the document showed no health hazards in food, aside from the small amount of people that might be a little sensitive to it, was enough to convince me that it would be okay on the skin. Now I just have to wait and figure out what works best in my aftershave.