Wondering what equipments you need to set up your Artisan Skincare Lab?
Are you confused about what to buy? How to start?
It’s completely okay to feel anxious at the beginning as the market has a lot of stuff to keep an eye on, and as a beginner, it’s quite a task to choose the best for your skincare lab.
If you are lost at this point, don’t worry, we will ease up things a little for you!
What is Artisan Skincare?
It is a wide range of handmade high-quality skincare and wellness products skillfully crafted using natural ingredients and no preservatives to enhance your natural beauty.
Over the ages, women all over the world, have always turned to a handful of natural ingredients and their natural properties to keep their skin glowing and flawless.
People these days root for environment-friendly products too and are switching to chemical-free beauty products
This trend of homemade natural products rather than chemical-laden products has become popular because people nowadays are more concerned when it comes to what they put on their skin.
Why is Artisan Skincare becoming “The New Favourite”?
Who doesn’t love to go all-natural without having to worry about layering their skin with harsh chemicals? Yes! We all do.
All-natural unadulterated ingredients, as good as the luxury brands, providing a wide variety of fragrances, colours and products are specially handcrafted for you.
And also the cosmetic labs do everything to ensure that their products are environment friendly and top-notch.
We already have many reasons to love it!
List of essentials you need to get start your Artisan Skincare Lab
Log Book
Turn the pages and you have all the trials and errors recorded, you have all your experiments and ideas in one place. It helps you analyse your experiments better, point and list corrections and to keep a track of your experiments, which eventually results in growth.
The more you write, the better it is.
Jot down the experiments you do with your products, list out things that you want to improve and monitor your progress.
Raw Materials
You need to ensure you have enough raw materials and everything you need to get started.
Weighing Scale
If you want to set up a cosmetic or a skincare lab you definitely need to have a good weighing scale. It’s very important that the right weight of each ingredient is added while crafting the product so as to maintain its efficacy and for that matter you want your scale to be as precise as possibly it can get.
* Precision of 0.01 grams is highly recommended.
“A Digital Bench Scale is indicated for the most accurate measurements but as this scale is quite expensive you don’t need to own it in the beginning when you are just starting.”
Initially, a kitchen weighing scale or a jewellery scale is a good option.
Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
Even when you are dealing with natural ingredients there is always a risk of potential damage. For example – exposure to certain essential oils can be corrosive to the cornea of the eye.
“PPE has to be a part of the lab essentials and should be included as good manufacturing practices.”
Why PPE?
We need PPE as it minimizes the exposure to a variety of hazards along with minimizing the chances of your final product getting contaminated.
Following are the must-haves –
1. A pack of disposable gloves
2. Eye protection goggles
3. Hairnet
4. Lab Coat
5. Lab footwear/shoes
6. Face shields/masks
Lab Glasswares
Your cosmetic formulations involve delicate mixtures and you simply cannot use a plastic bowl or kitchen utensils to mix the ingredients, you need to get hold of high quality, heat resistant, laboratory-grade glasswares (Beakers, funnels, containers etc.) to avoid breakages.
There is a variety of glassware of different sizes available in the market and you can decide the type and size of the container as per your ingredients and the size of your batch.
You at least need three types of containers to get going –
1. Raw material container
2. Prototype making container
3. Final product storage container
Bain-Marie(Water Bath)
when you heat your ingredients directly over the flame, they burn and tend to lose their beneficial properties. Therefore you do indirect heating using a water bath.
You can set up your own water bath using a shallow pan or pot, a hot plate and a thermometer to record and adjust the temperature as per requirement.
You can cool down the final product in the same way by putting the container carrying mixture into the pan containing ice and cold water.
Testing Equipment’s – pH Meter
Now that you have your wonderful formulation ready, you will need to check and ensure that it meets the desired specifications and is completely safe for use.
You will need a pH meter and pH strips to test the pH of the product so as to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with the natural pH of your skin.
You may need a Rheometer when you are dealing with products of variable consistencies.
Stirring Equipment
Every formulation requires some kind of mixing and stirring to create the final finished product. Using glass or stainless steel equipment is highly recommended.
Below are some of the stirring equipment that you will need –
1. Spoons
2. Rods
3. Whisk
4. Spatula
Note – Please avoid using plastic equipment.
Sanitization
Cleanliness is vital when manufacturing cosmetics, it is your prime responsibility to ensure that your product leaves the lab as clean as possible and for that, you need to have a strict hygiene plan in order to avoid any kind of contamination of your lab, your equipment, or your final products.
Some of the ways of sanitization are –
1. Using Soap and hot water for keeping hands clean
2. Using hot water (Boiling water, whenever possible) and liquid soap to clean the lab counter or work station.
3. Disinfectant floor cleaners for regular cleaning of the floors.
4. You can have a spray bottle filled with alcohol to spray sanitize the equipment.
5. Heat-resistant equipment can be steamed.
6. Some may need sterilization (destroying both living forms and spores of micro-organisms) and can use a hot air oven or autoclave for the purpose.
Packaging and Labelling
After you are done formulating the product, always put a label on it mentioning the manufacturing date and other necessary details in order to keep track of its shelf life.
Let’s admit we are all attracted to cute packaging! Those eye-catching bottles, jars, pots and tubes in all colours are definitely a treat to the eyes. You can put your formulation in a variety of containers. You can go for custom-designed cosmetic packaging. You can also go for your own skincare label design making it even more attractive.
These were some of the essentials you need for setting up your own Artisan Skincare Lab but, that’s not all!
Ps: To make your dream come true and to make your brand a great success, here are some extra tips that will make your initiative a huge success.
1. Be clear on your vision and a long-term dream.
2. Take things slowly, give yourself time to learn and put down a solid foundation. Learn to take baby steps before starting to run and that’s how you get a hold of everything.
3. Keep it simple every time you start to work with a new ingredient and after mastering the basics you can go all innovative and experiment more with your cosmetic formulation.
4. Bring your uniqueness – Be authentic, you can be inspired by other brands but eventually do it your way. Infuse your ideas, take risks because you won’t know unless you try, and even if it fails, pull your act together, gain some perspective and move on to the next attempt.
5. Do simple things well. Master the basic skills, heavy-handedness happens to all of us, and even the best of us at some points but don’t give up because murphy’s law exists!
6. Be consistent – Taking the first step is always difficult but once you swim out of that zone you can get to the places you cannot imagine.
I hope you found this article helpful! Have more ideas of your own? Feel free to share your ideas in the comment section below
