SOLID HAIR CARE AND CLEANSING  WITH ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS

By Petra Biehl

53% of German consumers want to see more innovative ideas for sustainability from the big beauty brands. Solid hair care and cleansing formats offer one opportunity to fulfill this request as they already unify several environmental benefits in one product.

Based on figures from “Free The Ocean” more than 552 million plastic shampoo bottles end up in landfills every year. Solid bars are an alternative for waste-conscious consumers as they significantly reduce the need for plastic packaging. At the same time these products help to protect water resources as they contain less water than a liquid product making them appealing for eco-conscious users too. A third environmental benefit is the reduced carbon footprint. Their weight leads to less CO2 emission due to lighter transport. When you look at all these environmental benefits together these bars seem to be products for the future. However, what about their performance, and do they meet the demands of today’s consumer?

Even if environmental protection is key nowadays, consumers still want to have a comparable performance to what they are used to, which is the challenge for formulators.

Consumers are accustomed to the optimized conditioning and foaming they get from the liquid products they have been using so want to keep this performance when changing to a format for a better tomorrow. A prime example of a product that offers environmental and performance benefits in a solid format is our conditioning shampoo bar:

• To obtain the right conditioning effect several ingredients that each offer their own benefits have been combined. VARISOFT® EQ 100 is a highly efficient liquid and a fully biodegradable conditioning agent. The emollient TEGOSOFT® OER MB also influences the conditioning performance of this bar. Due to our unique eco-efficient production process it has an improved impact on global warming by lowering the CO2 footprint. 
• To evaluate the application performance, we conducted an in-house sensory hair swatch test on bleached European hair which showed that this formula outperformed an established market product on a number of parameters for example, wet/dry comb and wet/dry feel. In an additional application test the foaming behavior was also evaluated with the new formula’s foaming performance similar to the benchmark product. 

In a nutshell, this selected formulation combines all the benefits for the planet that today’s more eco-conscious consumers are looking for.

Let’s work together to support our environment by making use of our know-how to rethink your existing formats. Contact us to have a discussion on how we can help, or visit intoBeauty® for more information.