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.
Okay, so you’ve learned about the different phases (heated water, heated oil, and cool down phases), let’s take a look at tweaking a basic formula for a lotion. Let’s consider our questions about the lotion…. What kind of product do I want to make? Is it a moisturizer, body milk, lotion, cream, or butter? For...
To clarify, when you’re creating any product, think in percentages, not grams or volume. When making any product, you’ll want the total ingredient list to come to 100% (mine vary because I’m thinking about other preservatives you might want to use, but 100% is the ideal). If you look at the recipes on this blog...
So we’ve taken a look at our heated water phase and the heated oil phase, so let’s turn our attention to the cool down phase. What do we put in the cool down phase? Pretty much anything that won’t tolerate the heated and held phases of our water or oil, meaning anything that should be...
Heidi suggested we take a look at the Hope in a Jar cream by philosophy in light of what we learned about the dollar store lotions the other day. This cream can cost between $38 and $105 for 8 ounces, so what makes it so expensive? Let’s take a look at what Sephora says about...
The second of our three phases is the oil phase, so let’s take a look at this phase and how to tweak it! The oil phase consists of oil soluble ingredients that can be safely heated and held at 70˚C for 20 minutes. This is where you’ll find our emollients, emulsifiers, thickeners, and anything that is...