Request a NanoBase™ Sample

NanoBase™ has no free sample program. A sample is a genuine working quantity of the architecture itself: 500 ml or 1 liter, priced and shipped as the manufactured raw material it is, not handed out as a marketing giveaway. Because it is real production material, requesting one starts with an account, moves through a signed non-disclosure agreement (NDA), and typically clears approval within 48 hours of a complete application; the material itself then follows on the standard 3 to 4 week lead time. What you are sampling is not another surfactant blend tuned to slot into an HLB-balanced system. It is a modern replacement of an HLB base, built from the start as a tri-domain architecture, and this page is where that evaluation begins.

A sample is either a 500 ml or a 1 liter quantity of the NanoBase™ Architecture: the same tri-domain material that ships in commercial orders, engineered under DLVO-based electrostatic stabilization, not a simplified version made just for evaluation. It ships as a low-viscosity Architecture, ready to load with oils, actives and texture. It carries no actives of its own and makes no disease or structure-function claim; you build the body, sensory and finish of your own formula on it. It is a cosmetic raw material for leave-on topical use on intact skin, built from INCI cosmetic-grade materials and formulated to align with the Clean at Sephora standard, so that question is already settled before your sample arrives. There is a cost attached, consistent with supplying a manufactured raw material at a working volume. We do not list that figure here; it is addressed once your account is active.

HLB is a single number the chemist William Griffin published in 1949 to pick a surfactant blend that pushes a two-phase oil and water system toward one target emulsion type. The packing-parameter framework behind it, Israelachvili, Mitchell and Ninham (1976), is why formulators have spent decades assuming that one amphiphile system settles into one equilibrium morphology, and that any other structure showing up in the batch is a defect to blend away. Seventy-seven years later, that is still the convention most emulsifier systems on the market are built to obey.

NanoBase™ does not contest that packing-parameter law, and it does not contest the fact that nanoemulsions are kinetically, not thermodynamically, stable systems to begin with (McClements 2012; Gupta, Eral & Hatton 2016). What it overturns is the design convention layered on top of both: the assumption that a formulator has to pick one point on that curve and force an entire batch to converge on it. When you formulate on a modern architecture like NanoBase™, you are not selecting a single morphology and suppressing the rest. You are sampling an engineered, DLS-characterized tri-domain architecture in which nanocolloidal, nanoliposomal, and nanomicellar domains coexist by design in one lecithin-based chassis, held apart by a DLVO-based electrostatic wall rather than narrowed down to a single droplet population.

The polymer self-assembly field has already documented this kind of coexistence as a loss of control, a condition to be engineered out of a batch (Doncom et al. 2017, a polymer-field convention describing that field’s chemistry, not a study of NanoBase™ chemistry). NanoBase™ was built in a lecithin-based cosmetic chassis, not a polymer system, and it treats that same coexistence as the design target instead of the defect. That is the structural difference between sampling another HLB-balanced blend and sampling what replaces it. For the full head-to-head on where HLB-balanced systems fail and how the tri-domain upgrade addresses each failure mode, see NanoBase™ vs HLB; for how the Architecture itself is built, see the NanoBase™ Architecture.

We ask you to apply for an account before you can request a sample, rather than list one for instant purchase. NanoBase™ is a professional cosmetic raw material, not a consumer product, and the review exists so the people evaluating it are the formulators, brands, and contract manufacturers who will actually build with it. Applying is a short qualification step, not a sales gate designed to slow you down.

If what you actually want is an ongoing supply relationship rather than a single evaluation, our partners page describes what that deeper commitment looks like. Many partners started exactly where you are now: one sample, one NDA, and a question about whether the Architecture would hold up on their own bench against whatever they run today.

Approval and the NDA move together. Once we receive a complete application, a working scientist typically returns a decision within 48 hours. If you are approved, we send the NDA alongside the activation, and executing it is what opens the deeper technical file that sits behind the public TDS. None of this is designed to be a bottleneck. It exists because NanoBase™ ships with real compositional and characterization detail attached, and that detail is only appropriate to hand to an account we have actually reviewed.

None of this replaces your own testing, but it gives you a documented starting point instead of a blank one. Additional deposition and characterization methods sit on our future validation roadmap, not in our current data. DLS is the assay we run in house today, and the one your documentation package will actually contain. For more on what that DLS characterization does and does not tell you, see the research and evidence page.

Typical lead times for a sample run 3 to 4 weeks from an approved, active account to material in your hands, on top of the 48-hour approval window above. Build both into your evaluation calendar, particularly if you are testing against a launch date of your own. Our capacity, a boutique nanoscience lab paired with a 9,000 sq ft production facility, is built to support serious evaluation without turning it into a guessing game about when material will actually arrive.

Pensive Beauty® manufactures the NanoBase™ Architecture. We do not manufacture your product, and a sample does not change that division of labor. What it gives you is the material itself, a low-viscosity Architecture ready to load with oils, actives and texture, so you can build the body, sensory and finish of your own formula on it at your own bench, using the same gentle, room-temperature mixing you would use with any liquid raw material: no special nano equipment required on your side. From there, the real test is a direct one: run your build against whatever HLB base or emulsifier system you use today, side by side, and judge the result on your own bench, not on our description of it.

If you want to understand the tri-domain structure you are building on before you start, the architecture page walks through how the three domains are meant to work together. While your sample is in transit, the free AI Chemist can help you reason through a first build. The interactive version and its cost calculator live on pensivebeauty.com, home to the company behind the Architecture.