The California Chapter of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists's February meeting will look at health & safety challenges in personal care products and moisturization. The 5pm speaker is Mary Redmond, senior applications specialist, ANGUS Chemical Company. Her talk, "Health & Safety Challenges in Personal Care Products," will present a regulatory overview of amino alcohol chemistries that can keep formulators ‘above-the-curve' on the evolving global health and safety standards. She will also discuss chemistries that offer molecular engineering to improve performance through multi-functional properties to make the best formulation perform even better. Redmond has 28-plus years of cross-functional experience in R&D, technical service, and technical sales supporting development of market-driven product innovations, plant engineering for inventory control and high yield through-put, and formulation and process optimization. Prior to joining ANGUS, Redmond served in various roles of increasing responsibility at True Value Manufacturing, AkzoNobel-Sikkens, and McWhorter Technologies (now Polynt).


The dinner hour (6:30pm) presentation is entitled, "Moisturization through the Ages," and the speaker is Geoffrey Brooks, president of Ideas4Cosmetics and Geoffrey Brooks Consultants, LLC. Brooks will discuss some of the highlights on the important dynamics of how water works within the skin and hair, the relation to water in the environment, and what the cosmetic industry has done to enhance the skin’s appearance by topically applying products. Brooks is the scientific advisor to Botaneco Inc on natural seed extracts - oil bodies and storage proteins for cosmetics and nutrition. His past work includes Solazyme, Arch Chemicals, Croda, Beecham Group and Brooks Industries, where he served as the chief technical officer.