AoS Sandalwood Ingredients - Henk

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Ingredients: Aqua, Stearic acid, Myristic acid, Glycerin, Potassium Hydroxide, Coconut acid, Natural Aroma, Sodium Hydroxide but what the hell is

Methylisothiazolinone ?

Preservative?
 
Powerful biocide and preservative within the group of isothiazolinones, used in shampoos and body care products.

Long considered safe for use in cosmetics, two recent in vitro studies have shown that MIT is neurotoxic, causing damage to rat brain cells in tissue culture. (So put your brains in a dish and mix with MIT and it might kill you).
 
Is indeed a biocide. MIT. Usually used in combination with PIT, if I remember correctly. We did a partial dossier on the combination a year and a half ago. Still considered safe enough for use, although I don't think that cosmetics was the main use area. I would guess that a soap shouldn't need a biocide of this strength.

Note that biocides in cosmetics, as long as they are present as in-can preservatives (i.e. not as biocides that need to kill things in or on your skin, but only as preservative during shelf life, both in storage and in use) are regulated under the cosmetics directive. The EU cosmetics directive has a full list of all allowed preservatives/biocides. Anything NOT on that list is not allowed in cosmetics.

Edit: it IS allowed as a preservative. I'd guess that in a soap/cream, it may be a recent ingredient, substituting parabens that have been under fire recently (entirely unwarranted); a typical example of a perfectly safe ingredient being substituted by a not nearly as well-investigated ingredient, purely under negative public (read: treehugger) pressure. I'm not sure that it is allowed in antibacterial soaps in the EU, although it is allowed as such in the US -- antibacterial soaps fall under the biocidal products directive. BTW, antibacterial soaps are total hogwash in domestic and office surroundings, and should only be allowed for use in areas where contamination is clearly dangerous, like hospitals and microbiological research...

Henk
 
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