You are making real products for real consumers / clients. It is important that you establish and understand every step of what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what the function is of each ingredient, whether it be related to stability, aesthetics or both.

It is imperative to be accurate in your lab measurements when you’re making a formula. Inaccurate measurements can have an impact on your formula structure, its stability and its aesthetic.

Learn to follow safety protocols, including wearing your lab coat, gloves, hair net and goggles.

NOTE: When disposing chemicals also be mindful of what you’re mixing. Will this acid/base reaction be extremely exothermic and cause a unpleasant/harmful reaction?

Taking accurate and succinct notes of your experiments is a very important skill so you can go back and see your progress on previous formulations. Taking good notes is also important for GLP (good laboratory practices) and GMP practices (good manufacturing practices).

It's best to start good habits of taking care of your glassware and instruments now and keeping your work area neat. You don’t want to conduct an experimental design with dirty labware. This can result in you later finding that you've contaminated your product. Inaccuracy can give you the wrong pH or odor, or even lead to instability or a not so pleasing aesthetic.

1. Wear a freshly laundered lab coat over clean clothing; safety goggles; sterile or sanitized gloves; shoe covers; rated face mask or shield.

2. Have freshly washed hands no matter how clean you believe your hands may be, it's important to wash just before applying gloves and always sanitize your gloves after putting them on to remove any possible cross contamination from the application process.

3. Sanitize all equipment before every use. Even though it was washed after the last use it needs sanitation now because the environment it was stored in has contaminants that may settle on equipment.

4. Use a freshly sanitized utensil with every use. Never move from one product to another using the same utensil, without washing and sanitizing to avoid the potential for cross contaminating one product from another.

5. Always sanitize (if needed) and seal your ingredient container(s), including the lid, between uses to avoid environmental contamination and excess air introduction. It's important that no matter how clean you were in the dispensing process you always wipe down the container rim and inside down to product after each use. Always transfer product to smaller, sanitized, containers to avoid reaching too far down into the container.

6. Never add any dispensed product back into the main batch to avoid the potential for cross contamination.

7. Unless otherwise and specifically indicated, never store bases refrigerated to avoid the introduction of moisture through condensation. All bases should be stored cool, dry, and protected from heat and light.

This ties in with safety, and it's important to understand which containers you can dispose chemicals into and the proper way to dispose them. Sometimes in the cosmetic chemistry lab, you can throw non-hazardous things like lip gloss and cane sugar into the trash. Other chemicals such as acids and bases (ex: sodium hydroxide and glycolic acid) should be disposed in a hazardous waste bottle.

Dispose of this container properly once it's full.