Eye Cream Formulation Feedback

It's good that you are adjusting the formula based on your skin's needs. Let's go through your questions.

1. Reducing ingredient percentages: Yes, it is perfectly fine to reduce the percentage of ingredients if the formula feels too heavy for your skin, as confirmed by the staff. Formulating is often about finding the right balance for personal preference and skin type.

2. Cream consistency (still liquid at 2.5% Luxury Cream Maker): You are right that 2.5% of an emulsifier like Luxury Cream Maker should typically result in a thicker cream. As the staff mentioned, using many different ingredients in a formula can sometimes make it more challenging to achieve the desired viscosity. Some ingredients, particularly certain extracts or actives, can interfere with the thickening or emulsifying properties of the cream maker. The mixing method can also play a role, but given that you are using a blender for 10-20 minutes, the mixing time and intensity seem sufficient for emulsification. The most likely reason, as suggested by the staff, is the interaction with other components in your complex formula.

3. Cream instability and settling: The observation that the thicker part settles over time but remixes when stirred strongly suggests that the solid particles in your formula are not being adequately suspended by the cream base. This leads directly to the next point.

4. Fine powder particles on the surface: These fine powder particles are almost certainly the SiliSilk you included in the formula. SiliSilk is a silicone powder designed to provide a soft, smooth feel and blur effect. As the product description for SiliSilk notes, these powders do not dissolve in the formula; they disperse.

5. Residue particles on the bottle: This is also consistent with undissolved or poorly suspended SiliSilk powder settling out and sticking to the container walls, especially after shaking.

Summary and Solution:

The issues with the cream's consistency and the settling/visible powder particles are likely related. The cream base, even at 2.5% Luxury Cream Maker, is not viscous enough to keep the SiliSilk powder evenly suspended throughout the product over time. This results in the powder settling (points 3, 4, and 5) and contributes to the overall feeling of the cream being too liquid (point 2), as the solid phase is not fully integrated and stabilized within the emulsion.

The staff's recommendation to increase the Luxury Cream Maker by another 1% (bringing the total to 3.5%) is the correct approach. Increasing the concentration of the emulsifier/thickener will increase the overall viscosity of the cream base. A thicker base will be better able to hold the SiliSilk particles in suspension, preventing them from settling and improving the perceived stability and consistency of the cream.

Recommendation:

Try increasing the Luxury Cream Maker concentration in your formula to 3.5% or slightly higher, while keeping the percentages of other ingredients the same as your current adjusted formula. This should help create a more stable emulsion with better suspension of the SiliSilk powder, resulting in a more consistent and desirable texture for your eye cream.