How a new ingredient class earns its place in a real product
Post 3 of 3
One of the most useful habits we picked up developing bioingredients is also one of the simplest: turn the bottle over and read the label.
Most products carry five to 10 functional ingredients, each balanced against the others for performance in use, stability on the shelf, and safety for the person using it.
That balance is why a formulation scientist is offered new ingredients constantly and adopt relatively few of them. That leaves little room for an ingredient that does not clearly earn its keep. Ingredient formulators are constantly evaluating new options, but only a small number of them make it into finished products.
Knowing that, Sironix chose not to shortcut the process. Sironix worked with three contract formulators with more than a century of combined experience in chemistry and product formulation, plus dozens of brand and CPG collaborations, to find where fatty acid furans genuinely earn their place.
Form: What an ingredient is and where it can go
Long before anyone asks whether an ingredient works, they must establish what it is. Some materials dissolve in water, some only in oil, some only when melted.
That physical character plays a primary role in what kind of product the ingredient can appear in. Something that must be melted at 80 °C is unlikely to be featured in a cold-mixed clear gel, however well it performs in a cream.
Underneath that sits the paperwork: an approved name, a safety dossier, and clearance from regulators in every market the product will reach, which is both the least glamorous part of the process and the most complex.
Many promising ingredients never progress beyond this stage — not because they necessarily fail, but because the work required to establish regulatory fit and formulation relevance can be substantial.
So, we worked both halves at once. Sironix arranged third-party testing supporting Furasoft™-SF’s safety for skin application, biodegradability, and 100% biobased content, while the formulators screened fit across rinse-off formats such as body wash and shampoo and leave-on formats such as moisturizers and balms.
Furasoft™-SF demonstrated compatibility across both rinse-off and leave-on formats, shifting the question from where it could be used to what it contributed once incorporated.
Function: What differentiates a new ingredient
A formulator’s shelf already holds a dozen materials that thicken, soften and stabilize. Most of them are inexpensive and thoroughly understood.
The bar for something new is therefore fairly high. It must demonstrate a benefit that more familiar ingredients don’t already provide.
Answering that honestly requires the right comparison. Furasoft™-SF contains stearic acid alongside stearoyl furan, so testing it against a plain base would prove little.
Our formulators ran it against a matched control carrying the same stearic acid the blend brings with it. Differences between the matched systems provide evidence for contributions from the stearoyl furan beyond those attributable to stearic acid alone.
In rinse-off systems, formulators have long relied on alkanolamides like cocamide MEA to boost foam and body, despite regulatory scrutiny around the amine group and the corresponding potential to form nitrosamines, highly potent carcinogens regulated by the EPA, FDA, and OSHA.
A fatty acid furan offers a different route to the same result. Its long fatty tail and hydrophilic, furan-containing head give it a genuine amphiphilic character, and that combination provides similar benefits to cocamide MEA in products such as shampoo and shaving cream, including improved salt thickening response, more luxurious and stable foam, as well as a more hydrated afterfeel.
Left: Foam height at the 5-minute mark from a high-shear blender foam test (ASTM D3519) for a baseline shampoo formulation (BSL), BSL + 1% Cocamide MEA, and BSL + 3% Furasoft™-SF (FSF). Green line: percent foam collapse for each formulation, calculated against that formulation’s own initial (time-zero) foam height. Right: foam appearance for each formulation after standing 5 minutes. Adapted from Murphy, Eady, Garcia and Krumm, Personal Care Magazine, September 2026.
As seen in the figure above, addition of non-ionic surfactants MEA and Furasoft-SF to the shampoo formulation baseline both resulted in the generation of lower volumes of more stable and structured foam. MEA addition to the baseline reduced foam collapse from 8% to 4.5%; however, Furasoft-SF was observed to completely eliminate foam collapse while maintaining superior shape compared to baseline.
Bright-field optical micrographs (20×) of a high-oil baseline moisturizer formulation (BSL) at 45 wt% oil loading, showing oil droplet size and distribution. Right: the same baseline formulation at 45 wt% oil loading plus 3 wt% Furasoft™-SF (a 1:1 blend of stearoyl furan and stearic acid, 1.5 wt% each). Droplets become more spherical and more uniform in size after modification with Furasoft™-SF. Scale bar = 100 µm. Adapted from Murphy, Eady, Garcia and Krumm, Personal Care Magazine, September 2026.
As mentioned in the prior post, the disruption of regular packing within fatty-rich regions by the flat, planar furan ring can impact how oil is held in emulsions.
The micrographs shown above compare two formulations at the same oil loading: the baseline emulsion holds irregular oil domains spread across a broad range of droplet sizes; adding Furasoft™-SF gives droplets that are both spherical and narrowly distributed. The cloudy, semi-continuous matrix surrounding those domains also sharpens upon Furasoft™-SF addition, which is the visual signature of an ingredient organizing the continuous phase rather than simply thickening it.
That organization is what results in the observed performance improvements for the treated emulsion, which held more than four times the control’s viscosity at the high shear of vigorous rub-out, and where both the baseline and the stearic acid control broke within 24 hours, it stayed intact, showed no oiling off, and gave a nearly unchanged flow curve after 2.5 months stored at ambient conditions. For a formulator, that is stable, high oil loading providing cushion and rich after-feel with smooth, clump-free rub-out, and no extra wax needed to get there.
To see the full formulation dataset generated for Furasoft-SF, including additional microscopy images, salt curves, additional rheological information, as well as comparisons to all stearic acid acid controls, please refer to Sironix’s Personal Care Magazine contributed article.
Future: Consistency in application, affordability—and the path to commercial production
A cream that looks right on the bench is not yet a product. It has to survive a warehouse, a hot delivery van, a cold garage and a year of use without separating or thinning. Nobody can wait three years to find out, so formulators accelerate aging to de-risk their market entry.
Our work on scale began with contract manufacturers. Pressure Chemical Company, a specialty chemical process development company based in Pittsburgh, began assisting Sironix’s move to external manufacturing in 2022, leading to a pilot-scale demonstration in 2025. With the process shown to be scalable and reproducible within a defined specification, attention turned to the formulations themselves.
We have now demonstrated six months of real-time stability for Furasoft™-SF in representative rinse-off and leave-on formats, with material from multiple batches delivering consistent purity and performance in full product formulation.
Then there’s price, a consideration every formulator must weigh no matter how well an ingredient performs. Small batches cost more than commercial production, so new ingredients start at a disadvantage to incumbents.
Based on pilot program inputs and work with collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sironix’s techno-economic analysis projects cost-in-use parity with other biosurfactants at commercial scale.
Turning the bottle over
No ingredient is perfect everywhere, and the filter exists for good reason. Our work with experienced formulators has helped illuminate where fatty acid furans show the greatest promise – and where more testing is needed. Accelerated aging continues toward the shelf-life expectations of major CPG companies, and projected cost parity will ultimately need to be demonstrated at commercial scale.
At the beginning of this post series, we posited that a genuinely new molecular architecture could expand the formulation playbook rather than substitute within it. The molecule made that proposition intriguing. The formulation data is what makes it real.
Ready to look more closely? Explore the full data, match controls and formulation findings in our newly published Personal Care Magazine article. Turn the bottles over while you’re at and contact Sironix to discuss where Furasoft™ may fit in your next formulation.