Im hazzarding a guess there but wat Kate described was all the characteristics of Erythulose.......DHA is also sugar based though I am not quite sure that if you were allergic to DHA that erythulose would be ok though?
I am googling like mad trying to find the name, but think thats it. I just know them as EHA/DHA.
I was told years ago that people with an allergy to DHA is ok with EHA. But I have always used products with both and never found anyone with an allergy to DHA, but there are clients out there. Whether its worth advertising the fact you have an allergy Free tan just to capture this probably very tiny audience is probably like selling ice to the eskimos.
Ok maybe this may help....
Dihydroxyacetone
It's not unusual to read about the exciting new sunless tanning ingredient Dihydroxyacetone [or DHA]. But DHA is not new, although it's still exciting [to me, anyway].
Dihydroxyacetone works by reacting with the keratin protein in the top [or "dead"] layer of your skin. This is why the results are temporary; this outer layer of skin is continually sloughing off.
The DHA in your sunless tanner was refined from a vegetable source, most likely sugar beets or sugar cane.
Discovered to be a temporary skin coloring agent back in the 1920s, DHA was first sold in an over the counter sunless tanning product in 1960 as Coppertone Quick Tan, also known as QT.
In the 1970s the Food and Drug Administration added DHA to their list of approved cosmetic ingredients.
Then, in the late 1980s, the cosmetic companies found a way to produce better results [browner, less orange] with DHA. The secret: an improved refining process yielded higher quality, more predictable DHA.
Since then, DHA has been further improved, leading to the current explosion of products.
Erythrulose
The situation for erythrulose has changed dramatically since early 1999. It's appearing in more and more sunless tanning products, even drugstore brands such as Neutrogena Sunless Tanning Foam Deep and Extra Deep.
Manufacturers who use erythrulose along with DHA in their sunless tanning products include Clarins, Neutrogena, and Decleor.
What is erythrulose? According to the
Pentapharm Ltd web site:
"Erythrulose is a ketose with the chemical property to perform a Maillard reaction with free primary or secondary amino groups of amino acids from keratin. This reaction leads to the formation of brownish colourod [sic] polymers called melanoids. Therefore, erythrulose was developed to work as a novel-skin tanning compound complementary to Dihydroxyacetone."
Those of you who have been studying for the sunless tanning quiz will feel a sense of deja vu because erythrulose does
exactly the same thing as DHA or dihydroxyacetone.
Because erythrulose is so similar to DHA in form and function, an urgent question pops immediately to mind: would it be acceptable to make an erythrulose only sunless tanning product for people who are allergic to DHA [and there are lots of them]?
I finally got to test this theory, thanks to
Fantasy Tan, who provided me with an erythrulose only formula. I used it for a period of time and learned that erythrulose alone is no picnic. It has to be applied every day, and it never gets terribly dark. But it does work.
The other question is: is erythrulose so dang similar to DHA that people allergic to DHA may have an allergic reaction to it, too? The answer to that seems to be
yes, thanks to feedback from visitors to sunless.com. In our vast testing group of five people, one person with a DHA allergy also got a rash from erythrulose.
Info from this website.
Sunless Tanning: Facts And Myths - Page Two
Hope that helps
Kate
