A bit of chemistry – making a wrinkle shrinker from silica gel.

I always save the silica gel packets I get with my seaweed sheets or electrical goods and I’m so glad I do because today I got to turn them into a gimmicky but fun (as long as you are careful) wrinkle shrinker.

What gave me the idea was a product that one of my work colleagues had brought to the office last week. We were all impressed with the instant tightening feeling and visible wrinkle reduction we got from applying this wonder serum.  Looking at the ingredient list it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what was doing the job but it didn’t take long for it to click.

The magic ingredient in that serum was sodium silicate.  Now I know sodium silicate as an industrial chemical used in dishwasher tablets for cleaning and polishing dishes.  I have never thought of using it on the skin though, not least because it is very caustic.  Sodium Silicate solution has a pH of between 10-13 which is way higher than I’d usually pop on and leave on my face. However, as you will see later, that’s exactly what I ended up doing.

Once I’d worked out that sodium silicate could act as a facial wrinkle smoother and filler I wanted to try the formula but sadly I had no sodium silicate and couldn’t be bothered to order some in so I thought I’d just make some – bring on the silica gel.

The recipe goes like this:

20%  Sodium Hydroxide Flake

50% Water

30%  Silica beads.

The first step is to make a sodium hydroxide solution in the water.  Sodium hydroxide is also highly caustic and can burn easily so gloves and eye protection are needed for this.  Once the solution is formed the silica beads go in.  It would be ideal to buy pure silica beads (or just buy the pure sodium silicate) as mine looked to have some kind of colouring to them but it did still do the trick.

Basically you just have to mix this merry lot of stuff up while heating for a good few minutes. I think it took me around 10 minutes to make around 100g of stuff.  You know when you have ‘cooked’ this enough because the mixture turns glue-like, sticky and stringy.  At this point I could see I still had a slight excess of Silica beads left so I added a bit more water to dilute the mix and kept mixing until I’d formed a liquid with no particulates left in it.  This probably took another 5 minutes.  If you are planning to do this I would recommend starting with a very concentrated solution as per the recipe above as when you dilute the mix, it is harder to see the Sodium Silicate stringiness happen.  Oh, also do take note that the reaction releases a smelly gas so make sure you have good ventilation and don’t breathe it in!

Once the Sodium Silicate Solution or ‘water glass’ was made it was time to make the serum base.

In a separate container I did this:

Water 75%

Veegum Ultra (Magnesium Aluminium Silicate)  1%

Xanthan Gum 0.25%

Sodium Silicate Solution 16.5%

Citric – to pH 10.5

Preservative 1% (I chose a phenoxyethanol/ ethylhexylglycerin mix.

The above is made by pre-blending the veegum with the xanthan then adding those powders into hot water while it is being mixed (by hot I’d say around 80C).  I used a homogeniser for a speedy hydration and it took around 2 minutes for this small batch to be ready.  Then I added the sodium silicate solution and mixed that in too.  I took the pH and adjusted it down to 10.5 with Citric Acid powder. This proved to be no drama unless you over-shoot the Pka of Sodium Silicate which is 9.83. At that pH or less the mixture changes from a fluid serum to a dryish gel because you have created silicic Acid and that’s no good for this job.  Of course I did that with the first batch as I’ve got an inbuilt safety device that just wants everything to be pH 5.5 no matter whether it makes sense chemically.

Anyway….

So once all of the above is done the resulting serum starts to thicken up to a nice paste.  The high pH is a bit of a worry but I kept reminding myself that people use Castile soap on their face and that has a pH of between 10-11.5!  I just have to say ‘be careful not to get it in your eyes!’.

I have been trying out the serum myself and I am quite impressed, not necessarily on how it smoothes wrinkles but in what it has done for my pores.  I have quite large pores and this seems to have made them shrink right up which is great!

But is this product good for you?

I would say that is a resounding NO.  I am not sure that this is BAD for the skin but there is nothing in there to do anything good either. I  call this a ‘gimmicky’ product for good reason and would probably not recommend using it as a stand-alone product on the skin all day every day. However, I can see how it might be useful on a special occasion, when you want to look like you are wide awake and have no pores or wrinkles. My biggest concern is with the high pH of the Sodium Silicate, there are other silicates out there and maybe there is one (or something else) that can do this same job but at a pH closer to that of the skin but I haven’t looked into that in any detail yet!

And the results?

Sorry about the fact that I forgot to do my hair today but I hope you can see how much smoother the right side of my face looks than the left!

Isn’t chemistry grand!

Oh and if you don’t feel like this is the product for you, at least you can use your up-cycled silica beads to wash your house – the silica solution is a good abrasive for a wash.