Hi, this is Perry, on make you a better cosmetic formulator.

I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and I'm very happy you are listening.

On today's show, we've got an interview with Kathleen Norris of the Formulator Sample Shop.

This company will be of particular interest to the independent formulators out there since they

have a wide range of ingredients and service accounts of many different sizes.

But before we get into that, I thought we'd do a deep dive into the topic of raw materials.

There are literally thousands of cosmetic raw materials that

formulators can choose from, but did you know that each type of

raw material can be broken down into three different

categories?

Let's talk about that.

If you go through the INCI Dictionary, which is the ingredient dictionary that lists all of the ingredients you can use in cosmetic products,

you're going to find that there are over 15,000 possible things to choose from.

This seems like an amazing array of compounds and it is. To learn every ingredient

would be pretty difficult. Fortunately, there is a lot of overlap in how these

ingredients are used in cosmetics.

I used to be a biology major and one of the things I like best about that subject was that the area called

Clodistics or taxonomy if you like. Clodistics is the study of grouping similar species together.

So lizards and snakes are grouped together as reptiles and cows and people are grouped together as mammals.

Anyway, I thought there should be a similar classification system for cosmetic raw materials,

and there wasn't.

So I did a little brainstorming and I put one together.

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