We have a lot of fun here at Essential learning about different ingredients we put into the products we make for our customers. Sometimes we even get to do a little old-fashioned detecting to find out what is really going on. This story is about one of those moments where a customer’s question sent us down the investigative path to discover the secret behind a sparkling powder. We hope you’ll enjoy learning more about what we do behind the scenes to help you get the exact right product every time.
What are those Sparkles?
One cloudy July day, an odd kind of weather for Oregon in the summer, I received a little note from a customer with an inquiry. She said that she’d purchased a body powder product from us that she was reselling as a baby product. The idea was to use this lovely powder to make sure that little babies’ tushies would be nice and dry so they would be happy and comfortable in a new diaper. You know, of course, health concerns are always at the forefront of customer thinking and ours. Our customer noticed that in her powder product, there were flecks of reflective material and contacted me because, naturally, when you’re talking about babies’ tushies, you have to be even more careful than usual. Babies’ skin is so sensitive and delicate, and like our customers, we take our responsibility very seriously.
My first thought was to look at the ingredient deck on the website because there’s always a lot of information that can be determined from that list. In fact, our whole website is a treasure trove of good information about products and ingredients! In looking at the ingredient deck, I saw that there was pink clay in the product. And clay, a completely natural, mined product can have slightly different sized particles. I thought, well, that might be it! Perhaps the customer is seeing light reflecting from the different sized particles of clay! But I wasn’t satisfied with that because I couldn’t “see” a reflection just from a list of words.
I realized I really needed to see the product itself.
Interrogating the Ingredients
For this part of the investigation, I enlisted the help of our Quality Assurance Manager, Travis, who pulled the manufacturing ticket for the client’s product from his file. Then we went to the batch retention room where we keep samples of every single lot, or batch, of product we make for three years. Both our wholesale customers and our private label customers have samples retained there for exactly this kind of inquiry. We pulled the sample from the lot our customer had purchased and then shook a bit onto our palms. We used a flashlight to really illuminate the powder, and, sure enough, there was a sparkle. A beautiful one! It reminded me of the fine shine of an excellent eye shadow. We wondered if there was something in this lot that was different from other lots since we’d never had this question before. So Travis located another sample from an early lot of the same product. And we put a bit in our palms, pulled out the flashlight, and the same sparkle jumped into view. We were really amazed and truly a bit baffled! The next question was to determine what ingredient could possibly have such a true sparkly sparkle!
In order to do that, I visited the lab since all of our ingredients we use are there. I had the ingredient list from the website, and Nic, one of our fantastic formulators, and I started pulling individual ingredients from the shelves to examine one by one. The first one we looked at was the clay since that had been my first thought about what might be causing the reflection. We put a bit of the soft, pink kaolin clay into our palms and shone the light on it. But, no sparkle. The next one we tried was allantoin (used to soothe irritated skin) but that didn’t sparkle either. However, we still had seven other ingredients to test. We pulled each one out on the bench and put a bit into our palms. And the third one was the winner! Simple baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) was the sparkliest lovely little powder ever! As a naturally occurring sodium salt called nahcolite, its crystalline mineral structure reflects and refracts light so it glimmers and shimmers like a teeny handful of stars when direct light is shined on it even though it looks like a flat white powder when illuminated by natural light. This is different from conventional baking soda like the kind you pick up in the grocery store which is made from other naturally derived materials in a lab and won’t have the sparkle of natural sodium bicarbonate. Mystery solved!
What to do about the Sparkles
In the case of the sparkling body powder, we recommended reformulating our stock powder with cream of tartar to reduce the glimmer from the baking soda. Cream of tartar helps with smoothing and softening the skin and is exactly the kind of ingredient you might want next to a baby’s delicate skin! Happy babies and happy customers. Case closed.
If you have questions, big or small, we’re happy to help you find the answers. Whether you’re asking about a stock product or want to have us create something unique for you and your customers, our entire team is here to make sure you get the information and the products you need.
