Classical fat parameters such as the acid number or peroxide value only describe the current status of oils and fats. However, they can only be used to make limited predictions about the stability of a product, which is an important factor to determine the value of natural fats and oils used processed by the cosmetics industry. This knowledge gap can be closed with the induction time as an additional fat index parameter.
The induction time reflects the interaction of bound and free fatty acids, the number of double bonds, existing antioxidants and existing pro-oxidants in the oil sample at elevated temperatures.
