23rd issue

HK Secondary School
The cosmetic competition held by The City University of Hong Kong this summer involves elements of both
Chemistry and Enterprise. The competition's goal was to arouse the interest of secondary school students in
cosmetic science and to engage them in applying chemistry knowledge and experimental skills in developing
new cosmetic formulations. Our school had three teams of students who joined the competition. They
designed new formulae for face creams, lipsticks, and face cleansers. Here are their reflections on the
competition.
Face Moisturiser Team
The competition was difficult, none of us had prior experience with cosmetic products. We
got quite chaotic and directionless when designing our formulation and decided to opt for
certain qualities we deemed useful (and then add everything arbitrarily afterwards). The
exploration of these different formulations were fun, and we got to see how by minutely
altering some substances, we got to improve or worsen our product drastically. Eventually,
we gauged a list of qualities we wanted and emulated it after less than eight tries. This was
the best quality product we would ever have. To then repeat the process to once again
generate this product proved to be impossible for the rest of the competition, as we either
forgot the composition or have done something wrong initially that led to a successful
mistake. Ironically, a competition that was niche and exploratory in our minds led to one of
the most eye-opening experiences for most of our group mates, as most of us did not take
biology as an elective subject. The experience allowed us to experiment with microbiological
tests, less rigorous testing, and a chance to write a report using latex, something new for
some of us.
Furthermore, the video production process was entertaining as it thoroughly challenged our creativity and
uniqueness by creating an attractive and fulfilling video. By assessing our strengths and weaknesses, we
decided that a more “speedy” approach by focusing on video-speech matching and information
compressing would both be more professional and efficient, given our extremely limited video length
requirements. The addition of Chinese rhyming and parallelism also effectively emphasised the selling points
our product offers, accompanied by our excellent choice of footage to suitably echo the speech enabled us
to stand out from all other fellow competitors. Unfortunately, difficulties formulating a condensed script plan
resulted in very short footage and post-processing timespan. Luckily, under our continuous determination
over multiple nights, we could utilise general footage for specific topics of the speech without hindering the
quality of our final video.
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