How to Choose an Emollient? Pharmaceutical and Sensory Attributes for Product Selection

Emollients are part of daily body care and have become indispensable therapeutic adjuvants for the treatment of dry skin conditions. Adherence to topical treatments, notably for dry skin conditions, has been reported to be low. The underlying reasons may include insufficient medical and nursing support for product selection, specific product attributes, aspects of product application, and product feel on the skin. Attempts have also been made to portray lipid content, galenic product format, or rheological attributes (pharmaceutical attributes) as adherence-promoting or adherence-preventing properties. In the treatment of dry dermatoses with emollients, there is little information describing and relating to these various features. We explored whether the sensory attributes of selected emollients were associated with common product attributes such as lipid content, viscosity, or galenic product format and discuss the extent to which this information is useful for product selection.

Nine trained panellists evaluated ten selected emollients based on a set of 18 predefined sensory attributes according to a standard guide for sensory descriptive analysis. Viscosity was determined using a rotational rheometer.

The emollients had product-specific sensory attributes. Lipid content, viscosity, and galenic product format are not generally indicative of sensory product attributes.

Contrary to popular belief, lipid content and viscosity are not generally indicative of sensory product attributes. This is mainly due to the different physicochemical properties of the lipid-phase ingredients, which are product-specific and diverse. As most emollients contain significant amounts of volatile ingredients that evaporate during and after application, their galenic format changes dramatically. Therefore, this is not a viable selection criterion. Because refined information on sensory product attributes, as compiled for this study, is rarely available in everyday life, eliciting individual and subjective patient preferences through dialogue remains crucial. Ideally, patient preferences can be elicited from the sample packs.