19d (edited) • Lab Talk
Lab Talk: Are you testing or just watching?
There's a question I've been thinking about this week, and I wanted to ask your thoughts.
A formulator asked me recently whether putting her formula on a shelf and checking it regularly counted as a stability test. The short answer is: not quite. Watching a formula over time gives you useful information about how it looks and behaves at room temperature. But it's a single type of data under a single set of conditions. It tells you nothing about pH drift, how the formula handles temperature stress, or whether the preservation system is holding up.
But here's the thing: most of us do start here. Leaving something on the shelf and watching it is a reasonable starting point, and I don't want to make it sound like everything you've been doing is wrong.
My question for this week: when you make a new formula, what does your stability process actually look like? Are you running a deliberate testing protocol, or are you mostly observing and kind of hoping things hold? And if it's the latter, is that a choice you've made intentionally, or just something that hasn't come up yet or perhaps you don't know what to do?
I'm genuinely curious where people are with this. Stability testing is an area where many formulators, including experienced ones, have less coverage than they'd like. No judgment here, just an honest conversation. 🌼
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Lab Talk: Are you testing or just watching?
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