ChopSaver creator Dan Gosling talks all thing skin care and ingredient safety with chemist Tammy Lisi. (Originally posted on Facebook Live March 25, 2021. Please forgive the audio/video mismatch. Full transcript below.)
Dan Gosling: There she is!
Tammy Lisi: So funny story. I had to do it on my phone, on my computer. Wasn’t working. So I love,
Dan Gosling: I do find it interesting for all, for all the Facebook executives that are watching this right now, maybe they could figure out a way to make the phone interface and the computer interface a little more, I don’t know, similar, easy to find. So a little more obvious, a little more obvious
Tammy Lisi: The phone works really, really well. So I’m going to try to stabilize my phone now. Sorry guys. So hopefully that works. Okay. All right. So you have some questions and things you want to talk about with a lip product skincare,
Dan Gosling: And it doesn’t even have to be just lip products. So first so you can hear me. Okay. You’re good.
Tammy Lisi: Can you hear me fine?
Dan Gosling: Yes. Yes, we’re good. All right. So those of you that stuck, you know, stuck with me for those first two minutes. Thank you. Yeah, so you are a chemist, but that can mean a lot of things. You’re a chemist that sort of specializes in, is it, this is just skincare. Is it do other people come to with other other projects? Or how does that work? Maybe it’s just a little bit of your background and what led you to where you are now.
Tammy Lisi: I’ll give you the background. So I have been a chemist. You know, I got my degree back in 1994, so there’s some dates for you. I started out in pharmaceutical, so new drug development and then worked my way over into personal care. So if you look me up on LinkedIn, I have a lot of weird publications in the field of neuroscience pain research. So I did a lot of that kind of work. And then at some point my husband said, Hey, let’s move to Iowa. And I worked for the University of Iowa and academic research and then decided that that really wasn’t where I wanted to be and found myself working for a contract manufacturer that we both know, and that’s where we met. Right. And,uand ended up moving over to personal care. So I, we actually do a lot of different things here. So we do quite a bit of lip balm and personal care and anhydrous formulas, but we also do shampoos conditioners and that type of thing. And,uwe’d been branching out and doing quite a bit of H I and I, which is household and industrial formulations, mainly because there’s a big social media push for the HII to be more skin friendly. And so people are looking for that type of thing. Uand then we do a lot of new raw material evaluations, which that can get a little bit interesting. So we look at new raw, potential, new, raw materials. Are they going to be useful? What are they going to be useful for? And we do that for the big raw material suppliers.
Dan Gosling: So when you say we your, you use,
Tammy Lisi: So we have I have another chemist that works with me. Her name is Jenny DeSotel and Jenny is from most recently P&G. Her and I have similar backgrounds in that she also started in the pharmaceutical industry, actually started the same company as I did just a different division. And she’s younger than I am. So a lot later than I did. So we did cross paths there. We actually crossed paths at the contract manufacturer that I met you through.
Dan Gosling: Right. So you’ve worked in large, I guess I’d call it corporate settings. And now you’re basically, do you call yourself an entrepreneur or do you call yourself just a small
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. You know, I mean, you have to be very entrepreneurial to be for people thinking I want to be a cosmetic chemist. You have to be very entrepreneurial because you have to think like somebody who’s launching a brand, even though it’s not, you personally, it’s not us that are personally launching the brand, we’re doing it for other people. You still have to think about that. So for example, if somebody came and said, Hey, I want to design a product for teenagers, and I want to make this bright, beautiful colored lip balm with lots of fancy flavors. You’ve got to think about that. And what kind of experience you think of that age group is going to want versus let’s say, you know, our age group, you know, we want different things and you’re a musician. And so you created your brand for that specific group of people at first. And then you kind of look at how you can branch that out into other areas,
Dan Gosling: Right. So I assume you prefer working for more for yourself as opposed to working in a corporate setting. And at that probably it depends on what the setting is, but you’ve, but I would also say that probably is what helped you get a list of contacts or a network to start your own business.
Tammy Lisi: Right, right. So you know, I am fairly, well-known in the cosmetic industry and I have my own Facebook page called Unicorn Chemist where sometimes I post things like how to control blooming of Shea butter or how to stabilize the you know, for, for people who are maybe DYI-ers and thinking they’re going to. Cause you started at that point, you started as,uyou know, making it yourself. Right. And so I’ll post like the microscope. I have some microscope images of, of how Shea butter bloom starts that makes that famous grit that you and I both love.
Dan Gosling: We won’t talk about that!
Tammy Lisi: Um so, but we you know, so I have that Facebook page and so people know me for that. And when I left that contract manufacturer, I had several companies that basically called me shortly after I left and helped me start this. Plus the fact that I actually, maybe, you know, this, maybe you don’t, I have an uncle who used to own a raw material distributor for cosmetic products, and he’s not really my uncle by blood, but you know, my uncle anyway, he actually helped me to work with the raw material suppliers. So we actually do still work with three raw material distributors and, you know, one main one. But then we work with their suppliers, so to speak. So like we might do some work for a silicone manufacturer. Who’s trying to figure out how to improve,the, the look of silicones in a formula. Or we might look at, you know, help a natural product supplier with something that they maybe it’s a material that they were going to throw away. Or you have, so it had no use before, can we use that? Uand how would we use it? So we, we do that kind of stuff too, for them. And then we create formulas that other chemists can start with.
Dan Gosling: Right? That’s the, that’s a pretty impressive list of, of core competencies actually, and, and things that you do. And probably not a lot of people do as well, or that they have that many things that you, that you an expert in. But what I think is really cool. So just, if anyone’s just joining us now, I’m talking to chemist, Tammy Lisi, and of course, anyone wants to type in a question, please do so, but I have a few. So let’s, let’s start with lip balm because that’s my world. And as you and I discussed, my product happens to be on natural and organic ingredients. I am proud of that. I think that’s cool. I think it’s it’s a nice marketing tool. But poison Ivy is a natural ingredient. It just, just because something’s natural,
Tammy Lisi: Arsenic, right?
Dan Gosling: I mean, the list goes on. There’s so many things that, that are indeed natural, but there’s nothing you’d want to ingest or put on your skin. So to be fair, I always kind of approached it that way. Yes. Natural, natural ingredients are great only if they are helpful. And to be fair to the, the more chemically produced products out there. But not all those things, perhaps that sound really bad are really bad, but then there might be some that in fact, maybe shouldn’t be, so let me just poke a little fun at, you know yeah, well, so for, for example, my, you know, the, the, the brand, everyone knows in my space there are, there are parabens in it. There’s a methyl paraben and propyl paraben and paraben is one of those words that’s gotten thrown around in the last, I don’t know, 10 years or so as being bad. Can you,
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. So the whole parabens being bad things started from a fairly inaccurate now we’ve we found has, is a completely inaccurate paper. And that paper basically looked at breast cancer tumors in women, and they discovered there were parabens in it. And so the conclusion drawn by that paper back in the day, and I want to say that paper was the late fifties, early sixties. Uit’s it’s older. Yeah, it’s a, it’s an old paper. And obviously it got picked up a lot in the nineties as a marketing tool. And then we really started thinking about it,umore recently and more recently, even still, we started discovering that there’s this thing called the skin’s microbiome and, and that type stuff. So that’s another bit of a topic, but,uwhen we talk about parabens, most people assume that they’re man made. The truth is, is that they are actually occurring in nature. And so the tumors that they found parabens in were naturally occurring parabens from the human body. So when we eat berries and other things, we actually are consuming them. And so the running joke in the industry is there’s probably more parabens in a cup of blueberries that you might eat than what would be in your cosmetics, but it’s too difficult for,umost brands to overcome that. Uexcept for the fact that you’re starting to see Revlon and L’Oreal who make a lot of mascara say that there’s no safe preservatives because parabens are preventing microbial contamination from product. Uanyway, they’re saying there’s no safe preservatives in mascara, unless they can use parabens because eye safety is a big deal. And, and so when you’re talking about mascara, that’s right near the eye. And,uas you know, like I,uI’ve had a few of these stories where people go to the like Sephora or someplace and they try a mascara and then, or an eye product. And then they end up with an eye infection later because those things are highly contagious. But if you, we most likely, if we had parabens in we’d have a longer shelf life for those products and we’d have less likelihood of those diseases spreading or reoccurring.
Dan Gosling: So a paraben is basically a preservative.
Tammy Lisi: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So there’s two things that we really look at in skincare for preserving. One is according to the FDA, we actually do have to prevent microbial contamination. So most commonly, now we’re starting to see what we call the preservative free push. Those are ingredients that really control the water activity level in your lotions and creams and things to prevent yeast, mold, E-Coli, salmonella,
Dan Gosling: Right. Things you wouldn’t want.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. Well, those, all those really scary words to most people and staph and staph occurs naturally in your skin. It’s what causes acne. So you do need those preservatives to help control what you’re putting on. You don’t want to put on an excess burden. So, cause we know that causes skin disease of some sort. And when I say skin disease, it could be as simple as acne or some other kind of contact dermatitis. So, but in lip balms, they’re generally anhydrous. So as long as they don’t have any water, it means that they don’t have yeah. Anhydrous means they have no water. So most life needs water to live. So when you look at a lip balm, most of them don’t have any, so they have no food for microorganism. So as long as the stick and we put ChopSaver through this, can withstand an insult of bacteria, yeast, and mold. Then we don’t worry about whether or not it’s going to need a preservative. They’re kind of, we call them self-preserving because they they’re resistant to growth. They’re not a really good growth media is what that means.
Dan Gosling: Okay. Interesting.
Tammy Lisi: I know. I sometimes get science-y. So if somebody has a question and need clarification.
Dan Gosling: Yes, yes. So clearly there are things that have gotten out there and, and you said those studies came out in the fifties and sixties, so this was way before the internet, but it took hold and…
Tammy Lisi: When the internet took hold and people started digging through NIH and things like that. Yeah. and NIH is where most scientists go to research papers. It’s the National Institute of Health. Anybody can go there and just like type in a topic and read as many papers about that.
Dan Gosling: Interesting. So again, not all these long, weird names are necessarily bad, but are there some let me ask you this, are there things that are still being used in the industry that you do wish were eliminated or regulated better?
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. So one thing that is always concerning to me and I see this happening mostly in the MLM spectrum of the world where people are selling to their friends. We were starting to see some drugs being used in some of those products, some actual drugs. And so yeah. And so that’s a little concerning for example we we had one recently that has a glaucoma drug in it. That glaucoma drug can actually lead to, if you don’t have glaucoma. Yes. It grows eyelashes. Yes, it does. It grows thicker. It grows, it can grow up to three extra rows of eyelashes.
Dan Gosling: Right. So back up.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. If you think about ladies wanting. Yeah, you know, they want lots of eyelash. And so these companies put this glaucoma drug in there because it actually does grow eyelashes, but we’re starting. But then they had issues because some people were actually having problems with temporary blindness sagging around the eye, other things that were side effects of this drug. And because this company wasn’t using it as a drug per se, they weren’t having to list the drug facts. So that’s a little concerning. So I get a little concerned when people want to put like athlete’s foot powder and a, in a foot cream to help control, you know, athlete’s foot or something like that. Because I do think that that can lead to people, not understanding to watch for side effects and, and control those. But the rest of the cosmetic industry is very well regulated in the us. And obviously in the EU they have a little different guidelines and, and Canada has a little different guidelines, but if you’re going with a reputable company, that’s, you know, has some good sales and things like that, you’re going to generally find that all of their materials are tested. They’ve done human repeat insult patch test. That means that they’ve tested it on people’s skin. And as you know, you can then get a dermatologist signature from that. So, and say that it’s non you can’t really say it’s non-allergenic, but the dermatologist signature indicates that no one had a reaction out of 50 subjects using that.
Dan Gosling: So that’s the standard.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. That’s the standard. So we see that quite a bit as starting to become, like, if you have a dermatologist signature, that’s a pretty good and you sell in dermatology offices.
Dan Gosling: Yeah. So yeah, we’ll, we never, we’ve never been able to do like clinical trials, but we have scads of anecdotal evidence and, and, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of dermatologists that are familiar with the brand have been using it for years. And so that that’s where their comfort level comes from. But it sounds to me what you’re talking about is kind of a loophole in the labeling laws that someone’s using a drug, but they’re not using that drug for what it was designed for. They can literally use it in a different way.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. And we see this most commonly with people that don’t want to do sunscreen testing. So they will basically put zinc in a product, but not conduct the sunscreen test. So you really don’t know if it’s protecting you from the sun. And as we learned about, I think it was five years, maybe six years ago now, when there was a big recall through one of the large companies, because they changed brand of zinc, they ended up sunburning people much faster. So that can be a little bit of a cautionary tale is yeah, you can throw zinc in a product, but are you going to burn people faster or are you really going to protect them? So when it comes to things where you really are trying to protect yourself, or you’re trying to treat an actual medical condition, a lot of times I do prefer to see the the doctors, you know, the, those little drug fact boxes.
Dan Gosling: Right, right, right. Well, since you brought up SPF, let’s quickly touch on that. And I don’t know the arcane or the bizarre numbering system that we have in this country. You know, I always the most basic fact, I always tell people is like a 30 is not twice as more, twice as powerful as a 15 and a 45 is not three times 15. So maybe just start with that. And again, we’re talking more about labeling issues than the actual ingredients, but it does cause a lot of confusion, right?
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. So sunscreen stands for the sun protection factor, and then you have these numbers, you have 15, 20, 30, sometimes 33 30. So that’s how many minutes it took for someone to get a burn without re application of the product. Okay. So if you think about, you know, an SPF 15 lip balm, you’re really probably gonna keep applying that more than every 15 minutes. And when I say someone to get a burn, I mean, we have, we have kind of archaic sunscreen testing guidelines, and even the FDA has admitted. They’re kind of barbaric to the subjects because you do have to burn them. You are actually taking the product and plying it on people and burning them. And so you have to have 10 subjects as you know, and some of them are fair-skinned, some are medium and some are dark skinned. And so you have to literally, and they have to all be subject to burn. So when I say, dark skin, I mean, like they still have to be able to burn, so it’s not very dark skin. Right. So when the fairest people start to burn, you know, that’s when they, they start, you know, figuring out the numbers. So if you have like me wearing a lip balm, that’s an SPF 15, I’m probably going to have to reapply it every 15 minutes. But if I’m outside in the sun in the summer, I probably am reapplying quite often. Just because I’m a little addicted to lip balm, which, you know, as, you know, people can become addicted to a lip balm product, they feel like there’s a couple of things that go into that from a neurochemistry standpoint and from a skin physiology standpoint. But I tend to, when I’m outside, working in the sun become more addicted because I know I’m losing too much moisture through my lips and I’m going to burn faster. So for me, I’m probably going to be okay applying that every 15 minutes. But if you have somebody who’s maybe not as prone to burning an SPF 15, they don’t have to apply that every 15 minutes to stop from getting a burn. Most likely they’re going to be incredibly safe with that type of product. They’re going to be able to apply it as often, you know, when they start to feel their lips drying out and maybe that first tingle and they’re going to escape the burn. So that’s kind of a, a user thing. Now I know recently the FDA has come and said no more SPF, one hundreds, no more of these really super high SPS, because it’s really hard to convince people that they don’t have to reapply. And the higher you go with your sunscreen number, the harder and more chemicals and more barriers, you have to jump over to get to those numbers from a formulation standpoint. Right.
Dan Gosling: Right. You got to put in a lot more chemical to get those numbers. Yeah. And people are misinterpreting those numbers as being, Oh, I’m good all day or whatever. Yeah.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. Like I would love to just put on a product in the morning and forget about it all day. But for me, I can’t do that. There’s also a whole lot of brand new skin cancer studies out there, I go to the sunscreen symposium, which is every other year in Florida and it’s a really great educational tool to just learn what’s going on with the FDA learn what’s going on with everything. So I, I go to that every other year. And it’s always interesting to me to sit there and hear all the new research coming out in skin cancer and how straight up zinc titanium sunscreens really need to be combined with a chemical sunscreen to be incredibly effective. Like you can’t just have a chemical there, like you can have just a chemical sunscreen and be very effective, but these mineral ones really do a lot better if you can combine them with chemicals and then you have more of a barrier. So, you know, you think about zinc and titanium. That’s a barrier between you and the skin, your skin, and the sun. The chemicals are actually reflecting the sun. They’re not a barrier. So to speak, trying to think of how to say this without losing people. But yeah, I think as we go forward, you’re going to start to see a lot more of these combinations. So-Called combination sunscreens, especially since zinc feels really bad on your lips, on your lips, in my opinion, we’ve, we’ve been down that road. Right. Right.
Dan Gosling: Right. It’s why we just, yeah. You can put the chalk on your lips if you want, but for me, that’s no longer ChopSaver. It’s not the ChopSaver experience that we’re looking for, which is why we’ve always had that, that chemical sunblock
Tammy Lisi: You lose that that moisture skin protection that ChopSaver stands for. So it’s, you know, that’s a very brand specific sensory thing. I can’t imagine playing a clarinet with zinc on my lips.
Dan Gosling: Well, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. What, believe it or not, we were almost half an hour into this and I don’t want to take too much of your time and maybe we’ll do this again at another point in the future. But let me ask you this too. Two final questions. One, what, what excites you? What, like, what, what part of your job you like, like the troubleshooting or creating something new or what really gets you excited when someone says, Hey, Tammy I’ve got,
Tammy Lisi: I enjoy it all, Dan. Like for me, I, I mean, I’m always a little bit disheartened when somebody calls me to troubleshoot something that’s happened in manufacturing, because it means a brand is struggling. So it does light a fire, but it lights a fire because you’re worried that, you know, if you don’t solve this, that it means real income for somebody. New, raw materials are always fun because you just, you don’t know what they’re going to do. So sometimes they get very, that gets very exciting. So we do a lot of that, but I don’t know, I think it’s really fun to create something new for people like a new experience. Some of the new formulas that are coming out to try to make you know, have people interact differently with a product they’re a little out there and maybe kind of too trendy, but there’s things like powdered lotions where you have to add water in your hand and make your own lotion or that type of thing. Yeah. Those are, those are always interesting. But, you know, yeah. So I think for me, like some of the new tech is kind of, is fascinating to work with, but maybe some of it’s out there. I, you know I will kind of do myself a disservice, I guess if I don’t mention that the personalized side of cosmetics that’s starting to come out. So there’s, there’s this new trend and people have probably seen the brands Function of Beauty, Formulate and Prose. And I actually work with a formulate and that is where they’re actually personalizing each and every product that goes out the door for individual use. Those are shampoos and conditioners right now, moving into skincare soon. So that’s exciting because you have to think about it from a whole new angle, right. So you have to think about how are you going to develop this, not for the average consumer before the individual consumer. So that’s a special challenge. So it kind of goes along with the the new raw material side of the world, but it also adds those other challenges. So you’re talking about kind of traditional type products, but now you’re, you’re thinking about how you’re going to make them different. So normally brands tell the consumers what to expect, but in those brands case, the consumers telling the brand what they expect. So it kind of flips it on it’s head.
Dan Gosling: So the consumer is saying, I want it to have this and this and this. And they literally make them a custom product line.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah, yeah. So that gets a little bit, it’s it’s tricky, right? Because you can’t have infinite raw materials. Right. So you have great those different sensorial, different expectations with a limited number of materials. And so that’s kind of probably right now, the most exciting thing that I’ve play with in my wheel house. But I don’t know. I still enjoy, you know, just a good, you know, I want a great lip balm. That’s just going to be amazing. I mean, they’re, they’re still fun. It’s just that there are a lot of challenges with personalized, cause you’re thinking about how, what the consumer’s real needs are going to be.
Dan Gosling: Wow. That could be a whole, I mean, I assume this is not a cheap product for the consumer when you’re
Tammy Lisi: No, they’re pretty expensive. Yeah. I mean, looking at I think it’s $50 for a 12 ounce set, so that’s $50 for 12, you know, for a set of shampoo and conditioner. I make them myself and take them home. So I haven’t purchased my own, you know, haven’t purchased anything yet from Formulate. I should really do that. But it, it just, like I said, it just makes you think of things differently. You’ve got to think about all the challenges from a manufacturing standpoint, there’s some challenges in that from a quality standpoint, what are your challenges you know, how are you going to achieve viscosity? How are you going to achieve pH checks at the end? So there’s the manufacturing of that is actually, you know, quite fascinating. Yeah. So that Formulates plant is in St. Louis. So, you know, sometime it’d be kind of fun maybe to meet you down there. Maybe we could put a deal with ChopSaver, put it in our, in our skin care boxes.
Dan Gosling: Yeah. So final question. If you could say something to the general skincare product consumer right now what would, what do you think, what do you wish more people knew or were aware of when they’re buying things or just general skincare? I don’t think people think of their skin as like an organ, but it is really the largest organ in the body. And that covers everything. It’s more important to realize. I think,
Tammy Lisi: Well, the biggest thing that I think, especially with a pandemic out there is, is the biggest thing I can tell people is the health of your skin is the most important thing for fighting disease. So if your skin, your lips, your, you know, like your skin in general is not healthy enough, there’s a microbiome that lives on it. And that microbiome is very effective at controlling the intake of pathogens through your nose and mouth and eyes and ears and anywhere, you know, any other openings that you have. So when you think about that, if your skin has a rash on it or is too dry, or, you know, doesn’t have, you have a lot of acne or something like that, that means that your skin is not, is also not able to fight off as much of those pathogens that you run into every day. So it’s critical, you know, skin health is critical to your overall wellbeing. And, you know, if you’re, if you, you know, if you’re having problems with it, you should probably see somebody about it or look at your, you know, what else you can do for your skin health. And, and I think the biggest thing that we’re seeing right now too, is there’s that the big push to all organic products one of the most, and you have a lot of organic ingredients. There’s a difference between organic ingredients and USDA organic products. Okay. USDA organic products means that I can’t formulate with anything other than things that have a USDA, organic seal, natural or products that use organic ingredients. Like they might highlight, you know, made with organic, whatever sunflower oil or whatever those products, basically what those brand owners did. And one of the reasons why I love working with you is, you know, you basically sat there and went, look, I want to create the best products for my consumer that are really going to give them the best start for their skin every day. And when I do USD organic products, one of the hardest things to do is deal with that portion is how am I going to make this very limited ingredient product be as good and healthy for your skin as something that isn’t all organic, because it isn’t healthy. Yeah. It, isn’t healthy to just smear coconut oil on your skin. I mean, we’ve seen this over and over and over again. And in our industry lately where people think that they can just treat their skin with one thing and they do it. And then, you know, they experience, I have tons of images right now of hair that has been sent in from consumers that had shows breakage because they thought they could just use coconut oil as their hair conditioner. And then it caused a lot of breakage. It caused, especially if you have curly hair. So we see this over and over and over again. And you know, the best moisturizers really have are a combination. And, you know, it’s fine to highlight organic ingredients. I think that’s great, but what you can get, you can do so much more for somebody’s skin, if you can get out of that realm, which, you know, I mean, you know, their SPF is a, is a good example of, I want the best SPF product for somebody’s lips. Right. You know, you, you have a really good, as a matter of fact, we use it. You know, we’ve, we, we put quite a few people onto it because it’s so effective at you know, for those of you who don’t know, I show horses in my spare time. And so we’ve, we’ve put a whole lot of people onto it because when you’re showing horses, you’re out there in the sun and the sand, and it’s like being on a beach all day long. So yeah, it’s very effective for that.
Dan Gosling: Cool. Very cool. I can’t believe it. We’re 40 minutes in, I’m gonna, we’re gonna wrap this session. You are a wealth of information. We’ll promote this little more in the future and maybe get more questions from people other than just me, but I think you’ve answered some touched on some really, really important stuff. Things that I want to think about. And maybe we’ll we’ll address at a future time.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. Well, we, I, you know, I love just, you know chatting with you anyway, you and Noelle are great to just hang around with you guys have really interesting things you’re doing over there too. So,
Dan Gosling: And I’d love to see your place now that you’ve survived the, the the Midwest hurricane from hell.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. you don’t want to see my house, right. Well, yeah. So we’re, we’re living in a camper. The lab is intact.. I mean, we could do a quick tour if I don’t know, does Facebook shut you off at 45 minutes?
Dan Gosling: No, I just didn’t want to be yeah, you just
Tammy Lisi: Don’t want to be like, so you guys gotta be like a little bit nice to me because I didn’t plan on tour, but we have, we have a lot of equipment. So this is, this is our handy microscope. We do a lot of things like looking at anhydrous formulas, those oil formulas and checking them for stability issues with that. It’s probably kind of dark back here, but because Jenny has left for the day, but we keep all of our materials. These are all the you know, so we have several racks like this. So all of the materials are in secondary containment, which is kind of a safety issue. So you can see like, you know, there’s micas, there’s,these are all different flavors and essential oils from one company. And they’re all, brought in inventoried, all their paperwork is here. Uwe can do, I’ve got to keep an eye on where I’m at. We can do melt point. We have another big microscope.
Dan Gosling: So I used, you know, I always joke that I was mad scientist in my kitchen when I made ChopSaver, but you really are a mad scientist. You’ve got all fun stuff.
Tammy Lisi: We have all the fun things. Yeah. Viscosity. And then this little tool, I don’t know if we’ve used this yet, but this is a hardness tester. So you can check to see how hard something is over time. Sometimes that’s important with things like bath bombs and lip balms, because we need to know your sticks and, and this fun little guy he’s not very little, this is, this is a riometer. So it tells us how this is something is in different temperature can under different temperature conditions. So it kind of does like phase shifting and things like that. And see, like here is another whole rack. Oh yeah. Like we have, I mean, this it’s ridiculous. Hi Tammy, how many materials do you have? I have no idea. I would have to,
Dan Gosling: You are like a kid in a candy store!
Tammy Lisi: You know, there’s, there’s DIY-ers right now that are probably drooling over this, you know? And then yeah, we have a few different mixers. So this one is our problem child. Sometimes he just takes off and really mixes. We don’t know why, but this one is, a high shear. As you know, we use high shear for ChopSaver. So this one of our high shear mixers
Dan Gosling: And shearing is just another fancy word for mixing, right?
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. Only it’s cutting the particle to a specific size. So that you’re making a better mix. And then we have our regular good steady Eddie high shear mixer. Yeah. And then we have various scales, pH meter. It’s a mess back here. Sorry guys. This is our new toy. It’s a it’s a heated vessel that we can put, it’s got its own stir in it so we can keep things and to different temperatures based on whatever. And then this is the surfactant shelf. These are all different. Like if you want to make a shampoo or conditioner, these are all the different surfactants. I mean, just to kinda not overwhelm you, but there’s a lot.
Dan Gosling: What’s that? Surfactant?
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. So the things that make soap essentially, I mean, people think of soap, bars of soap, but those are, you know, base surfactants make the suds and, and all those things.
Dan Gosling: Yeah. Next time let’s talk about all, you know, what makes suds? What makes soap, what makes a balm, the difference between a balm and a lotion versus a cream, all these things you and I talk about, but I think would be interesting.
Tammy Lisi: Yeah. I, yeah. I love that kind of stuff. So we can, we can certainly do that. Yeah. But if somebody has a question and they want to just type it on the comment section, we can try to answer it as we see them come up the future. Yeah. I was going to say it in the future. We can kind of keep an eye out. I mean, you can always let me know if there’s yeah,
Dan Gosling: Yeah. I’ll post this on. I’ll post this, this up on my, on the blog, on the website and I’ll keep it, I’ll keep it on Facebook. I might even put it on YouTube as well, so yeah, that would be awesome.
Tammy Lisi: Youtube? Wow, another platform. All right. Well, it was great talking to you. Let me know if you have anything that you need. I know I owe you some samples of things, so don’t worry
Dan Gosling: Don’t worry about that. We’ll talk about that.
Tammy Lisi: Excellent. Talk to later. Bye. Bye.
Dan Gosling: Thanks so much. Bye-Bye!
