68 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS physical chemist. He, too, ranks high. Often, as we all know, the same quantitative formula in the hands of two chemists can result in products of widely varying ap- pearance. The physical chemist with his awareness of the importance of such things as temperature, pres- sure, reaction rates, surface and interfacial tensions, colloidal be- havior, and so forth, is a natural in the field of compounding and also in product and process engineeringJ If in addition, as is often the case, he has a talent for rigging up ap- paratus his aid in pilot plant pro- duction is indeed valuable. Strictly speaking of course, the planning of the pilot plant is the job of the chemical engineer. And nobody need be told what a help the chemical engineer can be if he has learned his lessons of unit processes and can judge equipment by some- thing more than the salesman's tempting description of what the gadget can do. Before we leave the question of compounding, I should like to men- tion the organoleptic man and the pharmacist. The organoleptic man is the fellow with the "educated nose." Every manufacturer knows the value of the right perfume when it comes to selling a cosmetic prod- uct. A consumer test can always be used to decide which perfume is to be picked, but a good organo- leptic man will see to it that the chosen perfume will not vary too much from batch to batch, once the product is on the market. Or if the management decides to change the fragrance of the product the organoleptic man can often engi- nee,' a change-over so gradual that it will not shock the consuming public enough to make the sales curve turn downwards. As for the pharmacist, anyone who has tried to work up a smooth ointment or cream with a few ordi- narily incompatible ingredients in it, knows what a good pharmaceu- tical man can create both in regard to appearance of the product and- even more important--its stability on the shelf. That in turn brings up the ques- tion of prod•ct control.. Here there is plenty of,.room for' the general analytical chemist. Reliable spec- ifications for cosmeti• raw mate- rigIs are rapidly becoming accepted. But specifi.cations are one thing, seeing that the raw materials meet them is another. For example, even a small variation from batch to batch of the triethanolamine you use in your lotion may upset your carefully laid plans for a cert'ain desirable viscosity. A good control chemist can spot those variations in time before the damage. is done. And raw material control, important as it is, deals only with the pre- liminaries. After all, the real func- tion of the control chemist is to keep check on production in all its de- tails, so that the unavoidable vari- ations from batch to batch are held to a minimum. That requires not only know, ledge of chemistry and a little engineering but great care, thoroughness, and a wide-awake mind.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR CHEMISTS IN THE COSMETIC INDUSTRY 69 I have heard people say that the control chemist is doomed to be a routine man all his life. Yes, he can be and remain a routine man, but then he is not a good control chemist. The wide-awake chemist in working with control can't fail to learn so much about raw mate- rials, formulation, and final products that he becomes a valued adviser of both the production manager, the cornpounder, the research staff, and last but not least, the purchasing department. In fact, other indus- tries have found it advantageous to have chemists advise the purchasing department in the matter of the best buys of the various products they need. So the good control chemist is not doomed to routine. He has his share of chances for ad- vancement. Before we leave the question of product control, don't let us forget the plant control man, the fellow who w•tches over the product in the making who checks on tank temperature, stirring ?ares, visual condition of the raw materials (they don't always look as good as the sample the purchasing agent sub- mitted to the laboratory, you know), packages and their appearance, etc., etc. Altogether too often this man is not a chemist, but if he is, what a grand "first line of defense" he is, when something goes wrong (as it does occasionally in the best of factories). His on-the-spot ob- servations can save the firm many weary moments otherwise spent in trying to trace the cause of a fail- ure, hours or maybe days after it occurred. And a chemical knowl- edge plus a little experience will often tell him the cause and suggest the remedy as well, when produc-' tion failures threaten. A first- class plant control man is a poten- tial production manager any day. So far we have dealt with chemists needed in the development of cos- metic products and in the main- tenance of quality. But there is an- other important angle, the safety of the products themselves. After all, even the best products will fail in the long run in spite of appear- ance, attractiveness of perfumo, package, and advertising if the con- sumers do not keep on buying them. And customers will not long keep buying any product if even a fairly small percentage of them are or become allergic to some ingredient in it or if the product proves a trifle irritating to the skin. Well, here's where the physiological chemist, the pharmacologist, and even the bac- teriologist comes into his own. Their work has become increas- ingly important with the appear- ance of Federal government regu- lation of cosmetics. Just to men- tion one example where the product information developed by pharma- cological testing is going to be im- portant: New synthetic surface- active agents are coming into the market almost daily. And often an addition of as little as a fraction of one per cent or so of one of these agents will not only confer desirable application properties to cosmetic products but will also increase the irritating properties of at least some