Apple Cider Vinegar – Our Eureka ingredient!
Most of us have heard and also used apple cider vinegar, be it as a pro-biotic additive or sometimes for hair conditioning.
Apple cider vinegar is necessarily acetic acid produced as a result of fermentation of fruit sugar. Due to this fermentation, apart from acetic acid, other biologically active and gut-friendly bacteria as well as other useful byproducts are available in the product. So apple cider vinegar should not be confused with just plain acetic acid, although it’s primarily made up of acetic acid.
Our eureka moment with apple cider vinegar came during the design of the product, when we invented that it can be used to neutralise the excess alkalinity of the soap, as well as to condition the hair, in a single product. This however is only possible due to a double-chambered design of the product, separating the ingredients into two chambers and mixing only on dispensing.
Our research uses a certain dilution of the mother liquid, such that in a double chambered design, it is capable of arresting the pH of the soap between 7.0-7.5, and the excess apple cider vinegar left after neutralisation can now be utilised for conditioning of the soap. This saves the consumer from the hassle of using a separate conditioner after shampooing.
This effect we are terming as auto-conditioning. In chemistry cleansing and conditioning are two opposing phenomenon. Hence they are applied one after the other, from different dispenser. But we are happy to produce a shampoo which can cleanse as well as condition, right from a single dispenser. Additionally note, we haven’t used a single synthetic ingredient to achieve this effect. It is only intelligent skin-care chemistry!
Preservative: Apple Cider vinegar serves yet another function. It creates a self-preserving environment for the biological ingredients in our products and protects them from microbial degradation. One of our chambers contains apple cider vinegar, the pH of which is around 2.5-3.0. This acidic environment combined with the fermentation by-products provide an excellent preservative environment, which does not require any further preservative.