Okay, after doing some looking up and dusting off my old Chemistry minor, I came up with a self-tried brew here that can act a lot like tend skin. Note, these guys watch their patent closely, and I don’t offer this advice so that people can bottle this and sell it, that would be wrong. But so that those that can’t afford the real deal, can at least enjoy some smooth skin. After all, these are readily available ingredients, so you do have a right to mix this up at home for your own use. And also, the Tend Skin people wouldn’t have to deal with people trying to make a version themselves if they just charged a more reasonable price for it. $16.00 for a 4 oz. bottle isn’t a good marketing strategy even here in San Diego where everything costs an arm and a leg. They are based in Florida where wages are depressed, I wonder about the price there. Well, enough of my bandstanding.
What you should know:
Aspirin, the active chemical itself, not the whole tablet, is soluble and stable in alcohol. The more alcohol, the longer the shelf life, of a home brew, I’m guessing weeks? I want to experiment with this later.
Aspirin is unstable in water, and will form acetic acid as a buy product, vinegar. The more water you have in your solution, the more vinegar-y it will start smelling as time goes buy. Aspirin will decay by 20% in about four days in water, but this is a fact I’m not really clear on.
Any water in your solution is only easing the sensation of the alcohol for you, but makes the solution less potent, more like vinegar and easier to detiorate. Water listed in commercial mixes are only due to the fact that they are using 90% or 70% alcohol and the balance of these percentages are made up with water. The other ingerdients listed are more for consistancy, texture/feel as you smoothe it on, and longer term shelf life (years)
Generic Walmart aspirin, which I use, contain about 325 milligrams of aspirin. The rest of the tablet is calcium phosphates, starches, and talcs. These are to just bulk up the pill, to aid against air moisture, and to buffer as the pill sits in the high acid environment of your stomach.
If you want to make a purely water solution and leave out alcohol altogether (you can, and it’ll work so so), remember that aspirin is only soluble in water to the extent of about three of these tablets per 100 millilitres, so in a pint of water, anything more than about 15 tablets is going to be useless waste. But as you add more alcohol, the solution will be able to hold more aspirin in solution. In mixing up water containing solutions, you will notice more heat and pressure being created, remember to vent upon shaking! this is the aspirin already starting to degrade into acetic acid, this is the heat given off from bonds of the aspirin chemical being broken apart (hydrolysis).
Okay, here’s what I do:
Take twenty generic aspirins, crush them up well, into fine dust in a dry vessel or on paper. Take an empty one-pint alchol bottle, make sure it’s completely dry on the inside, fill it halfway with 70% rubbing alcohol. Add the aspirin. Shake well for at least four minutes. Notice with pure alcohol you don’t get the heat, because of no hydrolysis, that’s a good thing. After shaking, let the solution sit still while you do your epilating, waxing, or whatever. After all the chalks, talcs and calcium phosphates have settled to the bottom in a white dust, carefully “decant”, that is, pour off without disturbing the sediment on the bottom of the bottle the clear alcohol layer into another dry bottle. Viola, there’s your solution. It works fabulous and you can pour it in a squirt-type bottle just for ease of dispensing. Of course I’d use gloves when applying it and I’d use lotion right after it dries, and don’t use anymore than you would a commercial, off the shelf mix, remember aspirin is an biologically active ingredient, you don’t want to over do it. If you get chalk on your skin, then you didn’t seperate out all the sediment chalk carefully enough. Try again.
I’m going to start experimenting with adding a little witch hazel and dispensing it into a spray bottle for ease of application. But that’s me. Good luck, and make sure you don’t have any allergies to aspirin or alcohol before trying this.
Mantaray
