16 HYGIENE


Hand sanitisers for COVID protection and more


Dr Andrew Warmington – Editor, Personal Care Global


The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a complete disruption of the supply chain, characterised by increasing raw material lead times and costs. The personal care sector was as vulnerable as any other. Traditional ways of working had to be adapted rapidly to meet the situation, including design work being done remotely and laboratory workers only going into the lab when absolutely necessary. In many respects, consumers changed


their priorities, according to Mary Lord, former president of the Society of Cosmetic Scientists (SCS), while giving the opening presentation at the In-Cosmetics Formulation Summit, which returned as an in-person event in London in November 2021. The kind of products and what they wanted from them reflected the changed circumstances, with a big culture shift from emotional connections with products to more transactional ones, Lord said. Demand overall, however, has been


buoyant throughout the pandemic, with certain exceptions, like colour cosmetics. And the situation created unprecedented demand for hand sanitisers, which in turn has raised multiple issues and challenges in terms of regulation, supply chain and formulation, among many other things. Not surprisingly, hand sanitisers were among the key themes at the summit. In some cases, the response has been just as


impressive as the development of the vaccines. Paolo Camattari, formulation and NPI manager at Lynoslife, shared a case study of the launch of the AirMedica brand of hand sanitiser and cream. For them, Day 1 of the response was 2 March 2020, 11 days before the pandemic. The company decided two days later to develop a hand sanitiser. Two possible formulations were evaluated: a liquid based on 60-70% ethanol that would have come under the Cosmetic Products Regulation (CPR) and one with 70% propanol-2-ol as its active in gel form that would come under the Biocidal Products Regulation (BPR). The final decision was to go with the latter. There were to be over 120 trials of different biopolymers, acrylates and taurates, as well as neutralisers such as TEA, sodium hydroxide and AMP. Lynoslife announced plans for large-scale


production on 5 March. Next day, the first orders were taken and a packaging provider was found, with scale-up trials beginning on 7 March. Filling began three days later and the first news coverage was received. By Day


PERSONAL CARE March 2022


Eva Lodén - Hand sanitisers can also deliver hydration


39, new production pods had been set up at the site in Cork, designed in ways to avoid unnecessary mixing between teams and reduce the danger of transmission. On 30 April, the Pesticide Control division


of the Department of Agriculture, Food & the Marine confirmed that AirMedica had been notified as a biocidal product. May saw the first 4,500 bottles being delivered to care homes and other institutions. In all, Camattari said, product development from concept to reality took 124 days, despite considerable challenges in terms of market expectations, ingredients, packaging, regulations and testing.


An uncomfortable truth In a similar vein, Dr Sayandip Mukherjee, leader of the Hygiene, Protection & Resilience platform in Unilever’s Beauty & Personal Care division, looked at the efficacy of personal care formulations against COVID and the wider implications for holistic hygiene. The pharmaceutical industry, he said,


had developed effective vaccines with extraordinary speed. However, they are not fully available worldwide and personal care formulations, including soap bars, handwashes, mouthwashes and sanitisers are


vitally needed to minimise person-to-person transmission of the virus. The WHO made an official statement about this in June 2020. The “uncomfortable truth” is that too many


people around the world are unable to clean their hands because they do not have access to such products, Mukherjee said. “Hand hygiene becomes an effective intervention only when we simultaneously address the problems of access, compliance and efficacy”. His focus was on the latter, specifically how Unilever has worked to ensure that its products have demonstrated the highest level of efficacy against COVID. Although it was already known that hand


sanitisers have the potential to deactivate coronaviruses like SARS-CoV2, because of the novel nature of the virus, Unilever decided to take an evidence-based approach to build consumer confidence in its products. In 2020, it began by testing three types in vitro for their effectiveness against the original ‘Wuhan’ strain: ■ Soap bars of different kinds ■ Liquid handwashes with varying surfactant composition ■ Hand sanitisers with different percentages of alcohol


www.personalcaremagazine.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84