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.
Fragrances show up a lot in various reports about ingredients we should avoid in our cosmetics, and there are a few reasons why this might be. One of the main concerns is that not all the fragrances or components of a fragrance are listed (although in the EU it appears they list all the various...
I’m a guest blogger on Saffire Blue’s blog today, writing about using shealoe butter in lotion bars and scrubs. I’ve been trying this stuff in everything and I love it. Here’s the informational post I wrote on this butter.For the permanent link to the second article, click here....
Many of the complaints about ethoxylated ingredients – those that have gone through the ethoxylation process, when ethylene oxide is added to fatty acid alcohols to give them detergent properties, to turn them into surfactants, like SLeS, our PEG esters, and things like ceteareth-20 – is that they contain 1,4 dioxane. A report put out by...
A lot of the concerns about mineral oil relate to occlusion. (One quote is that it “coats the skin like plastic, clogging the pores”.) If you’ve read any tiny bit of this blog, you know that occlusion is a good thing that helps reduce transepidermal water loss, and that mineral oil isn’t the only thing that causes occlusion. Great...
madpiano asks in this post: I do have a question though, as we are in Europe, we have slightly different preservatives available. I mainly use one called Microkill, it’s INCI is: Phenoxyethanol (and) Caprylyl Glycol (and) Chlorphenesin. Is there anything I need to watch out for? I know there is a similar US one, but that contians...