Welcome to the home of SwiftCraftyMonkey Formulating Inc.! Join Susan as she obsesses about cosmetic chemistry and other things (some possibly related to monkeys)! Here you’ll find over 5,000 posts and formulas written over the past 16 years for everything from lotions, creams, and body butters to hair care products to fancy facial products filled with actives and cosmeceuticals! Enjoy the site without distractions – no ads, pop ups, sponsored posts, affiliate links, “one weird tricks” – all supported by readers like you.
A lot of the commercial moisturizers you see are pretty silicone heavy, and we know silicones are a great way to offer barrier protection (dimethicone) and behave as surface smoothing agents for aging skin. I can guarantee if my mom likes a moisturizer, it’s likely to be quite silicone heavy. They offer quite a lovely...
I think Spectro-Jel might be a Canadian only product, but it’s been a very effective cleanser for my skin for years (until I started making my own – but I still take it on camping trips because it’s a great no-water-necessary cleanser!) It’s a lot like the Cetaphil cleanser we looked at the other day...
Oily skinned girls can use moisturizers, too, but they’ll need some serious modifications because oils are not our friends! I’ve written about creating oil-free moisturizers in the past, but let’s take another look at this recipe! The key to making an oil free moisturizer is – wait for it – not to use oils (you...
I love figuring out what’s in a product and duplicating it! I’ll give you an idea of how I figure out how much is in a product when I set out to replicate it. It’s based on what I know are the usage rates of the ingredients and where they end up on the ingredient...
If you have dry, wrinkled skin, we can modify yesterday’s recipe for dry skin by including a few more of those things wrinkled skin likes. Wrinkled skin likes emollients, surface smoothing agents, anti-oxidants, and AHAs, so let’s get that into our lovely facial moisturizer. Water phase: We can keep the water phase pretty much the...