A striking difference between men and women is that men know things are different but women can tell you how they are different. Is this because men don’t like to talk about their feelings? Women even claim that men don’t feel. Whereas the evidence for that still needs to be provided, one thing is certain: women are much better in putting their feelings into words than men. Why, then, are most wine tasters men? Luckily, we have enough female cosmetic formulators that can tell us what they feel in a cosmetic product in our industry.
But what do we actually feel? A while ago a good friend of mine and I had a difference of opinion about whether you could feel silicones in a cosmetic formulation. He (yes, a man!) argued that you can always feel them. I argued that that was not the case. To prove my point, I prepared five mixtures. I mixed a single heavy oil with a silicone in different proportions. I asked him to rank the bottles from the lowest to the highest level of silicone in the mixture. When my friend was ready, I asked him which one bottle had the highest and which one the lowest level of silicone included (‘just in case you have them reversed’) and following his answer, I told him that he had things exactly the wrong way round. His mixture with the highest amount of silicone had in fact the lowest amount. A perfect series but exactly the wrong way round. He was flabbergasted and even felt disillusioned. What went wrong? If I had used a light emollient, my friend would have easily ranked the products (which he later also showed he could). But the presence of silicones are difficult to feel in a heavy formulation. Because formulators probably would not mix silicones with heavy emollients (because it is an illogical combination), he was not prepared for it and failed my test. This led to a big discussion: what do cosmetic formulators actually feel? Do they feel silicones because they know they put them in (like my friend would normally do in his lab)? Does a formulator arriving at in-cosmetics Asia read the INCI list and then feel what is in the product? Or do they just feel the product?
During the skin sensory workshop, we will actually be testing quite a few products on our forearms. If you attend these workshops you will discover that it is actually not that easy to feel differences in skin feel and even more difficult (especially for the men in the audience) to describe what these differences are. Luckily, I asked a lot of women to describe these products for me, so I know that I have the right answers.... So, to the female cosmetic formulators, this is your chance to prove that you know more about sensory testing than your male colleagues and to the male cosmetic formulators, this is your change to challenge this myth.
To hear more from Prof. Dr. Johann Wiechers and register for his workshops at in-cosmetics Asia:
Sensory Science – Scientific Principles and Methodologies - Fri, 4 November, 10:00 – 13:00
Optimising Cosmetic Formulations Digitally - Fri, 4 November, 14:00 – 17:00
Prof. Dr. J.W. Wiechers
Independent Consultant for Cosmetic Science
JW Solutions
www.jwsolutions.com
www.jwsolutionssoftware.com