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.
SwiftCraftyMonkey 
I don’t think we can find the surfactant blend called LSB any more – in North America at least – as it’s been altered to have a very short shelf life of 6 months, so what can you do as a replacement? The short answer is that you can use any liquid surfactant suitable for...
I’m seeing these two questions asked quite a lot in the various solid shampoo bar groups I’m in – including the one I moderate, Syndet Shampoo Bars – and the short answer is no, you can’t dissolve a shampoo bar into water to make a liquid shampoo. Why? Let’s take a look at a few...
Original post, May 5, 2015. Updated July 15, 2022. In our haste to use the newest oils we can find, we sometimes forget about the oils that we might have purchased in the past. One of the oils I’m rediscovering is squalane, a bio-identical oil that we find in our skin’s sebum at around 12%....
This is a term you’ll be seeing quite a bit on the blog in the future, so let’s take a look at what this means. As a note, I’ve added a shorter version of this post into the glossary so it’ll come up in ever post from now on as a clickable link. A structuring...
How do I keep track of my ingredients between ordering and receiving? How do I remember what I was going to make with them and actually use them in my workshop? Here’s my process! When I order ingredients from a company, I take screen shots of my order, then print them out and put them...