Assessment of Micellar Water pH and Product Claims

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript presents a brief report to assess micellar water pH and product claims from 23 brands of products in Latvia.

This is a short report and I only have some short comments, listed below.

-Please reduce the length of the Introduction to be consistent with the brevity of the manuscript.

-Please add a short paragraph to make clear the literature gap filled by the findings and also to underline the novelty of the potential publication.

-Please add a paragraph to clarify what types of controls were used in this work: other products licenced in Latvia or same products licenced in other European countries or both types (best approach)? Please clarify.

-Please explain the methodology for selecting the brands and for collecting the specimens.

-Comment about figures. Please replace the box and whisker plot with a violin plot.

-Comment about tables. Table 2 is missing and table 4 is superfluous.

-A concluding section is missing. Please add appropriately.

 

Overall. Re-evaluation after correction as above.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The current brief report manuscript on the assessment of micellar water pH and its relation to the respective product claims appears to be well written and relevant assays and analysis were performed, hence I only advise on the following alterations before acceptance for publication:

- The limitations of the study should be further commented on, given the low sample size (only 30 samples);

- When the authors say “significance level of 5%.” do they actually mean 95%? If so this should be corrected;

- The abstract should end on a “general conclusions” note, hence a sentence on this should be added;

- Some paragraphs in the introduction section do not have the respective reference at the end (for example the paragraph between lines 34 and 39), this should be corrected all through the manuscript;

- A figure should be made and added about the molecular mechanism through which micellar waters act as cleansing products, as mentioned in lines 24 to 33;

- The registered mark symbol should be added to the brand’s names;

- Figure 2 quality (resolution) should be improved;

- A conclusion section, separate from the discussion section, should be added after it;

- The authors should mention which formulation characteristics, aside from pH, might be relevant to assess in this type of cosmetic products, and how they might relate to pH.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have improved significantly the manuscript during their revision. I have no further comments.