It is essential to our lives and skins. Although the trend is currently towards anhydrous cosmetics, it still seems useful to remind everyone that water is fundamental in product formulas. It does not only constitute the basis of emulsions, or an active vehicle: it also represents the source of promising innovations. The conference day organized by students at Université Catholique de l’Ouest in Guingamp (Britanny, France) for the 5th edition of U’Cosmetics was to prove it.
Its daily use has become so ordinary that we often think we know it well. However, it is not necessarily true, nor is it even new.
Indeed, Dr Christine Lafforgue, of the Dermopharmacology & Cosmetology Research Unit of the Pharmacy Department at Université Paris Sud 11, opened this conference day by reminding everyone that until the second half of the 18th century, philosophers and scientists alike considered water as a basis element characterizing all liquid substances… including oils.
It is only in 1781 that Henry Cavendish developed water synthesis by making a mixture of hydrogen and air explode. Then in 1783, Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier suggested water was not an element, but a compound made of oxygen and hydrogen. Ultimately, in 1804, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Alexander von Humboldt demonstrated water was composed of two volumes of hydrogen for one volume of oxygen: H₂O was born.
Water under our skin
Men, who water gave life to, is an organism made of… 65% of water, which means a 65 kg individual is composed of 42 litres of water. Part of it is incorporated to molecular structures – it is called bound water – and the other part flows outside of these …
