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 This product was originally aqua coloured, and now it’s an opaque green with a slightly brown tinge that you can’t see in the picture. We made this Blue Raspberry fragranced body wash at the end of November with the plan of giving it out at Christmas…and by then, it had morphed into this green colour....
Let’s say you want to make some conditioner, and you want 4 bottles of 8 ounces (about 240 ml) each. How do we figure it out from a recipe based on percentages or weight? The short answer is that you make a 100 gram batch of the stuff, figure out the volume of it, then...
Please see the updated version of this post with all the links intact from 2021! Click the link to see that new post! What’s the difference between moisturizing our skin and hydrating it? Are these fancy marketing terms or is there some difference between the two concepts? Let’s review what we need for a moisturizing product…...
I thought I’d bring this up again as I’ve had a few questions about this topic this week! You’ll note that just about every recipe on this blog is measured in percentages that convert into weight. This is because it’s more accurate than measuring 1 spoonful of this or 5 ml of that ingredient,...
It seems that every hair based community I visit and all the blogs touting the no shampoo, baking soda, or conditioner washing programs talk about avoiding build up…but what exactly is build up? Some of this is originally from this post on build up from May 22, 2010…Build-up doesn’t have a specific definition, but it’s understood to...