Development and performance study of a natural silk fiber facial mask paper

Abstract

Facial masks are beauty products which composed of a facial mask paper and beauty solution. Silk contains the amino acid structure closest to the human skin, and has the skin-friendly, cosmetic and antibacterial functions, but the common method for making nonwoven facial mask paper is not suitable for silk. In this paper, the silkworm’s spinning path is intervened manually to obtain a smart silk facial mask paper (SMC) of controllable thickness, so that the sericin on the silk fiber is well preserved. In the experiment where the SMC is compared with the nonwoven 384-cuprammonium rayon facial mask paper (CRMC) which is the most widely used in the market, it is found that the ways of forming the two facial mask paper are completely different, and therefore the morphologies under SEM are obviously different. The thickness of the SMC is 0.183 mm and the areal weight of it is 38.0 g/m2. It is very close to the CRMC (0.187 mm, 38.4 g/m2). The porosity of the SMC is 84.0%, which is slightly lower than that of the CRMC (86.3%), but its pores are well distributed. Compared with the CRMC, the smart SMC has higher dry and wet strength, lower elongation, slightly lower air permeability and liquid entrainment rate, and better antibacterial performance.