The home of SwiftCraftyMonkey! Join Susan as she obsesses about cosmetic chemistry and other things (some possibly related to monkeys). Often strange, occasionally useful, and always worth a stop as a point of interest on your journey through the Intertron.
It’s the worst part of summer for me – the end of July/beginning of August heat wave, where temperatures get to 35˚C (95˚F) with a Humidex of 39˚C (102˚F) with air quality warnings. I have air conditioning in the house and my car – as well as air conditioned seats, we just found out –…...
FOR JULY 2020 $10 SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Thanks so much for your patience waiting for this month’s e-book! I love conditioners so much, that if it hadn’t been for having a month end deadline, I’d still be writing! This month’s massive e-zine – The big book of conditioners, two: Building conditioners – is all about creating…...
Hi everyone! Sorry I haven’t posted over the last week, but I’ve been furiously working on this month’s e-book on conditioners in between bouts of serious headaches and pain after having two crowns removed. I’m going into Vancouver tomorrow for medical stuff, so this should resolve itself shortly. The next Zoom workshop – on using…...
Welcome back to our Newbie Tuesday series, introduction to making naturally compliant lotions using Ritamulse SCG! We’re in week 14, which means it’s time to make the second of three body butters! How will these differ from the hand lotions or body lotions we made in weeks one to twelve, and the body butter we…...
We first met this cold process emulsifier, Jeesperse® CPW-S or ICE Sunflower (Sunflower wax (and) sodium polyacrylate) in the e-book, Beyond Emulsifying Wax, part one, but I haven’t shared much about it here on the blog, so let’s take a closer look at it today! It contains 68% to 72% sunflower wax with 24% to…...
This question comes up a lot in the warmer months – how can I heat-proof my anhydrous whipped body butters? – and there are a few different things you can do to keep them from liquifying in the annoying and completely unnecessary season we call summer. It’s hard to keep our anhydrous (without water) whipped…...
Join me for an all-new Zoom workshop this Sunday, July 19th at 11 am (PDT, Vancouver time) on solubility! Understanding what mixes with what is so vital to understanding how to create your own products and identify terrible recipes in the wild. We’ll investigate how our ingredients dissolve in water or oil as we make…...
Welcome back to this series, Let’s make and modify products for summer! In the first part of this modification of the 10 minute strawberry & honey parfait with ViscOptima SE, we added some humectants, allantoin as an occlusive, and altered the oils a little bit. I shared our base formula with some modifications, which we’ll…...
Welcome back to our Newbie Tuesday series, introduction to making naturally compliant lotions using Ritamulse SCG! We’re in week 13, which means it’s time to make the first of three body butters! How will these differ from the hand lotions or body lotions we made? Catch up on the series in the links below! Or…...
Those are some stickers Inolex sent me promoting their more environmentally friendly ingredients, which we’ve used a lot on the blog, AminoSensyl™ HC & SC (positively charged or cationic emulsifiers), LexFeel™ N5 and N350 (silicone substitutes), and Spectrastat™ (preservative), to name a few, and they looked cute, so they became a great photo to add … Read more