This week we’re playing around with our new exfoliator, jojoba beads! Jojoba beads are the natural, plastic-free and biodegradable alternative to exfoliating microbeads found in cleansing products - and we’re really enjoying working with them. Let’s make up a good old exfoliating body wash.

Choosing Ingredients

For our body wash we’re choosing two liquid surfactants:

• Decyl Glucoside 
• Coco Glucoside

These are both mild and make lovely foam, perfect for a body wash.

We like including a little carrier oil for moisturising factor, but you can leave this out. Keep in mind that including an oil will make the body wash milky or white. If you want a clear body wash, leave the oil out and perhaps consider formulating with hydroxyethyl cellulose instead of xanthan gum, as HEC creates lovely clear gels. Keep in mind that HEC does not like non-ionic surfactants however, so you will need to use an anionic surfactant such as Hostapur OS Liquid (Sodium C14-16 alpha olefin sulfonate) or  sodium lauroyl sarcosinate.

Xanthan gum for thickening - you can play around with the quantity to create a thicker or thinner body wash. We find it easier to pre-prepare the gel part ahead, and then simply mix the surfactants and the rest of the ingredients into this. This way you can easily control the consistency of the body wash. However you can also simply add all ingredients to a beaker and blend until well combined.

We’re using  jojoba beads as the featured exfoliant. Our jojoba beads are Ecocert/COSMOS approved and made from hydrogenated castor and jojoba oils. They are white in colour, so if you would like to show them up in your product, add a colourant.

A preservative is a must as this formulation contains water. We’re using Saliguard BDHA, but Geogard 221 is a perfect alternative.

Lastly, you will need to adjust the final pH down with a citric acid solution as the surfactants used have a high pH. You can make up a citric acid 10% solution by dissolving 1g of citric acid in 9g of water.

Making Up Your Formulation

First up we need to decide on and calculate the active surfactant matter (ASM) we want our body wash to have. If you need a refresher on this, please read  A Beginner’s Guide To Surfactants.

Say we want an ASM of about 20% for our body wash. Both coco and decyl glucoside have an ASM of 55% so we can just calculate for the total ASM and then divide in half to get the ASM for each:

• 20/.55= 36.36% (we round this up to 36.5% for ease of calculating).

Divide this in two and we have the amount of decyl and coco glucoside to use. The rest of the formula will be made up of water, some moisturising oil, jojoba beads, a preservative and any other actives you would like to include.

This first version contains some moisturising oil, and will be white in colour (unless you decide to add a colourant).