(09-17-2011 1:43 PM)Alpha Dream Wrote:  Silicone perfume bases are an advanced venture and they are difficult to make. You have to even control the humidity in the air, or the whole silicone blend will turn into a milky concoction. Alcohol pulls the moisture out of the air, and since silicone refuses to mix with ANY water, ....

The purity of EtOH in of itself doesn't matter much as far as the diffusion, but when you start getting over 10% water in alcohol with a PG solution for pheromones, the pheromones will start to precipitate out of solution as the pheromone compounds are hydrophobic (they don't like water)

I could probably offer premixed silicone / alcohol base to some members.

In my professional opinion you are unlikely to get heavy molecules such as oxytocin to diffuse with any carrier. From our internal tests, I truly believe oxytocin does not have any effect, due largely perhaps to it's inability to diffuse at atmospheric temperature and pressure.

~ Chris

Thanks for clarifying it, Chris!

The pre-mixed silicone base would be excelent for members who want to try out this base. Would it ruin it if one would add Iso E Super to it?

Also, could you tell us more about your tests if it's not asking too much?

Thanks!

I'm not sure if there is any relevance in this guys, but let me know if something sounds amiss.

I've had many problems with a new batch of ethanol i tried working with. Previous DIY stuff with a 70% ethanol from source A has always worked without issues. I currently have a larger volume of 97% ethanol from source B and less than 30ml from source A.

Work done with source B has turned out to be somewhat unfruitful. Batch after batch of inconsistent results (or nil effects). I'm currently whipping up 3 vials of neno now, a molecule which has never worked for me with 97% ethanol from source B but is fine for source A.


Neno 30mg/pill/vial

Source A: 70% ethanol from a lab
Source B: 97% ethanol from a differing lab

Vial 1: Source A alone
Vial 2: Source B alone
Vial 3: Source B diluted with distilled water to become approx 70% ethanol


The first thing i noticed was that the muck from the pills seem to settle down significantly faster for Vial 1. Vial 3 doesn't appear to have the same effect. Is there any significance in this, guys?

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I will not rule out that source B isn't ethanol either.

Hi guys:

re anhydrous ethanol -- I wouldn't waste my time. If you expose anhydrous ethanol to air, it will pull water vapor from the humidity in the air until it is 95% ethanol. I'm a biologist and sometimes work with anhydrous ethanol. It gets sold in small sealed bottles, and I only use it a few times for applications that require 100%. After a few months of being opened and closed, it is going to be 95%. I don't know exactly how long this takes. It obviously will depend on the humidity where you are, but it isn't every going to be good as a stable product with any kind of shelf life.

(09-17-2011 1:43 PM)Alpha Dream Wrote:  It's very hard to get the water out of everclear. Freezing it won't work (ever keep a bottle of vodka in the freezer for cocktails?), the alcohol essentially works as antifreeze and the water will not freeze out of solution until about - 50 C.. You would need to boil and distill the spirit and condense the alcohol several times.

Incidentally, you can't get better than ~190 proof from steam distillation. you reach an aziotrope around that point where the liquid that boils off is the same ratio of water to alcohol as the mixture it came from.

I've made DIY lab hoods with plastic sheeting, wood frames, and low-pressure fans to create a positive-pressure air-filtered hood for working with fungi before in order to reduce contamination. I'm wondering if a DIY lab hood for controlling humidity would be practical, or if simply using sealed containers with rubber seals and transferring everything using syringes would be sufficient?
Neno, etc. from OTC capsules could be dried in a large sealed tupperware container with a small open container of hygroscopic material such as Drierite, or the moisture-removing gel sold at hardware stores, then quickly sealed in a container with a rubber top that could be punctured with a syringe needle so the silicones and ethanol could be added. Then once the heating/shaking/dissolution has completed, the solution could be extracted with another syringe. The "fines" or tiny particles remaining could be removed by injecting the solution into a sealed puncturable longish test tube with an ethanol-washed and dried cotton ball packed halfway down the tube, by squirting the solution above the cotton and letting drain to the bottom, then sucking it out with a syringe from the bottom. This would lose a bit of the solution, but does it seem plausible to work in air-isolated containers this way to dissolve, mix, and filter for a final mix with silicones and ethanol? Seems a bit less involved than trying to build and run a humidity-controlling lab hood.

Why go to so much trouble to be able to use silicones? Also, I don't see how you've gotten around the problem of your ethanol failing to mix with them.

There are a number of grades of siliicones, cyclo- and dimethicones with different centistoke values (how quickly they evaporate) and I'm very interested in matching a particular molecule to be vaporized with a silicone to do the lifting. An airport with multiple runways is a good analogy. I'll have to get some molecular sieves (beads with pores that trap water) to get the everclear to nearly 200 proof/100%, but once that is done the ethanol and the mones can be mixed with different combos of cyclo and dimethicones based on the molecular weights of the mones. I'm an experimenter, what can I say...

I love trying store-bought stuff, but getting to a level where I can mad-scientist my own mixes will be an obsession for years to come.
Plus with my lab experience from years ago, I still have all my old glassware, etc. and have to justify keeping it around for something.

Ah, okay. I can get behind the tinkerer's spirit

If I were doing I'd skip the supplements & buy pure powder from purebulk or the other place that sells it (links are somewhere in the DIY thread.)

I will probably go technical grade once I see results from the el cheapo path with OTC capsules. I'm really starting to think that doing an extraction in ethanol and a tiny little bit of pure water, heated and shaken, then rendered anhydrous by taking the water out with molecular sieves, would be an easier process to handle. Filtering, etc, and not having to worry about humidity. A final product with water removed, extracted with a syringe, then mixed in a sealed bottled with silicones injected by syringe might be doable without too much effort. The molecular sieves are just little ceramic beads that can be washed, dried in an oven, and re-used. It is seeming to be more approachable as I think about it. I wonder if the extraction turned anhydrous would separate in a layer anything that was polar? May be interesting.

(11-12-2011 11:23 PM)dbot Wrote:  Ah, okay. I can get behind the tinkerer's spirit

If I were doing I'd skip the supplements & buy pure powder from purebulk or the other place that sells it (links are somewhere in the DIY thread.)