Skin care chemistry Keeping it soft and pretty

Skin care chemistry Keeping it soft and pretty 

Beeswax. Whale wax. Borax. You may be surprised at what s in some of that stuff you put on your skin. 

The skin is a complex organ composed primarily of protein and naturally occurring macromolecules (polymers — see Chapter 16). Healthy skin contains about 10 percent moisture. Creams and lotions work to soften and moisturize the skin. 

Emollients are skin softeners. Petroleum jelly (mixture of alkanes, with 20-plus carbons, isolated from crude oil), lanolin (mixture of esters isolated from sheep wool fat), and coco butter (mixture of esters isolated from the cacao bean) are excellent skin softeners. 

Skin creams are normally made of oil-in-water or water-in-oil emulsions. An emulsion is a colloidal dispersion of one liquid in another (see Chapter 11 for a discussion of colloids). It tries to soften and moisturize the skin at the same time. Cold creams are used in the removal of makeup and as moisturizers, while vanishing creams make the skin appear younger by filling in wrinkles. Typical formulations for cold cream and vanishing cream are 

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