Evaluating Natural Alternatives to Synthetic Acrylic Polymers: Rheological and Texture Analyses of Polymeric Water Dispersions

The natural cosmetics market is growing, in line with the interest of public opinion on environmental safety. The availability of polysaccharides for cosmetic use is very wide; each raw material has its own sensorial specificities and hardly matches the performance of synthetic polymers. We developed an instrumental protocol based on rheology and texture analysis to evaluate alternatives to acrylic polymers. The study has been carried out on a set of water dispersions prepared with different synthetic, semisynthetic, and natural polymers at different concentrations. Using statistical principal component analysis, three different clusters have been identified: group A includes polymers with a stringy viscoelastic behavior, group B includes polymers with low firmness and a weak-gel rheological pattern, and group C includes polymers which formed soft and elastic gels. This work showed that this instrumental approach is a powerful tool to comprehensively characterize new rheological modifiers and to forecast their contribution to the formulation based on their applicative features. Moreover, rheology and texture analysis turned out to be complementary tools useful to compare polymeric raw materials and to identify appropriate alternatives to synthetic ones in order to formulate green cosmetic products.