The Green Chemist

The Green Chemist Blog

Green cosmetics stories from a mad scientist or a scientist mad about cosmetics

Barbara Olioso
3
FormulationsIngredients
May 15, 2019

Smoothing the path to Organic Beauty

Organic beauty is growing in popularity and gradually becoming more mainstream. However, despite this popularity and consumers’ somewhat romantic vision of ‘organic’, in the cosmetic formulator’s laboratory it is a different story: quite far from romance and closer to a drama, although always enjoyable. After…
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Barbara Olioso
3
Ingredientsnatural preservatives
May 15, 2019

Honeysuckle extract

Cosmetic preservation has become one of the key challenges in the industry today, triggering a great interest for alternative preservation systems that are widely antimicrobial, dermatologically and toxicologically safe and that have ‘consumer friendly’ INCI names, such as botanical names. Very few of these multifunctional…
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Barbara Olioso
2
FormulationsSustainabilityTrends
May 15, 2019

Ecolabels

Cosmetic ecolabels are super trendy because consumers desire for natural and organic cosmetics is growing. However there are a lot of grey areas in relation to green cosmetics claims and consumers do not have the skills to distinguish what is really natural and what is…
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Barbara Olioso
3
reen chemis interview formula botanica sustainability cosmetics green chemist
PodcastSustainability
August 24, 2018

Interview on sustainable beauty, how sustainable is natural?

I really enjoyed this interview with Gemma at Formula Botanica. We chat about natural, nature identical, packaging in cosmetic formulations and beauty products in the age of dilemmas. You can find more about different shades of green in our recent article on green beauty Feel…
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Barbara Olioso
3
Ingredients
February 23, 2018

What is the difference between natural, synthetic, naturally derived in cosmetics?

We trust natural, and we find this word all over, however  what is the difference between natural and synthetic today? What was natural 100 years ago is different from what is natural now. 100 years ago our ancestors were doing their washing by hand using…
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Barbara Olioso
8
FormulationsIngredients
February 12, 2018

Organic Healthier?

Recently I read an interesting article published on the British Journal of Nutrition. The article reported that organic produce has lower pesticide and higher antioxidant contents than non organic produce, opening a big debate about the value of organic. Is organic healthier? answering this question is…
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Barbara Olioso
4
Formulations
February 12, 2018

What you need to know about suncare product development

Sun protection is very popular and in demand these days as women associate UV light with ageing and look for sun protection for their faces all year round. However when it comes to developing a beauty product that has a sun protection factor things get…
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Barbara Olioso
17
FormulationsIngredients
February 1, 2018

Why henna hair dye is great and how best apply it

Being a regular henna user and fan I finally got round writing a post about why henna hair dye is great and how best apply it to make the most of it. Not all henna available is the same and the way you apply it…
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Barbara Olioso
8
FormulationsSustainability
January 28, 2018

Sustainability definition in cosmetic development

How many times have you heard of sustainability in cosmetics? or sustainable cosmetics in the last six months or so? to me it has become a buzz word, I thought it is time to write about it to understand not only how to apply the sustainability…
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Barbara Olioso
1
Ingredients
March 13, 2015

Perché l’ henné é salutare e il metodo migliore per applicarlo

Essendo un' abitué dell' henné, finalmente ecco qua il mio post sull' henné come colorante naturale per capelli e sul metodo migliore di applicazione. Infatti non tutta l'henné disponibile sul mercato é la stessa, quindi qualita' e metodo di applicazione fanno una differenza tra il giorno e…
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