An industry listed as one of the largest globally is the cosmetic industry. In recent years, this industry has shown growing interest in the application of natural ingredients providing advanced properties to cosmetic creams such as moisturizing, antioxidant, sun-protecting and antimicrobial effects. In this context, the present study concerns the production of cosmetic emulsions containing hippophae oil obtained via the methods of extraction, hydro-distillation and maceration using sunflower oil as the carrier oil. Firstly, an IR-ATR analysis was performed showing that the oils prepared were close to those commercially obtained. Then, the stability of the emulsions was tested over a time period of four months through measuring their pH and viscosity values with positive outcomes, and their antioxidant ability was also measured using the DPPH method. The latter one showed that hippophae oil greatly improves the antioxidant capacity. Moreover, based on the fact that sea buckthorn contains carotenoids, the SPF value of the emulsions was determined. The results showed that the addition of hippophae oil to the emulsions gave higher absorption in UV-Vis, thus higher SPF values. Py-GC/MS analysis was used to identify decomposition compounds in the produced oils. Among those, valuable compounds such as Ω-6, Ω-7 and Ω-9 fatty acids and many aldehydes were found by the decomposition of the oils.
Keywords: Hippophae rhamnoides L.; carotenoids; cosmetology; fatty acids; natural ingredients; oil extraction; pyrolysis; sea buckthorn.