OMG I can't believe this but I have the knowledge to answer this questions. (now hopefully I'll make sense)

Lotion is water+oil, think of it as making your own salad dressing. Water and oil won't mix on there own but if you add an emulsifier that will keep everyone playing nicely. (kind of like the mustard in salad dressing)

There is a whole HLB math system a very smart scientist made up for figuring out how much of a certain emulsifier you need. (don't worry I'm not going touch that one) Anyway, when you added the oil to your lotion you changed the ratio so you needed more of a certain emulsifier to get the scales even again.

After all that rambling I don't think emulsification (is that a word?) is the problem. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought both PG & VG are both oil & water soluble. I would think it could play nice with a little bit of oil in the flavoring. It's oil itself that may or may not be an enemy. We are worried that it can kill an atomizer before it's time. But, how do you judge that for sure?

Sorry this got so long, but at one time I wanted to understand the HLB system better for something I was trying to do. For whatever reason this whole thing wouldn't stick in my brain and it took help from my son to finally "get it".



Quote Originally Posted by Sunshyn View Post
I'm seeing a trend here. The most distinctive LorAnn flavors seem to be non-solubles. I wonder if the oil just carries flavor better.

I have very little experience with this type of thing, but years back I tried to add an herbal oil in with a water-based lotion. I seem to recall that there was a way to make an oil able to be mixed with a water based solution by adding something like vitamin E. I could be entirely mis-recalling this and don't have time to research it at the moment. However, before I spend time looking into it, could someone tell me if - should it turn out to be safe and even possible at all - would such a process make an oil easier on the atomizer?