The home of SwiftCraftyMonkey Formulating Inc.! 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.
SwiftCraftyMonkey Don’t confuse guar gum with cationic guar gum – regular guar gum is non-ionic and does not offer any substantivity to your hair, and it’s a fine white powder, not a yellowy powder. It will, however, behave as a good thickener for our products. It’s water soluble and non-ionic, which means you can add it...
Here’s a little chemistry to start your day! Let’s take a look at colloids, hydrocolloids, and shear thinning. What is a colloid? A colloid is “a substance microscopically dispersed evenly through another substance.” It can be a gas, solid or liquid. It consists of two phases – the dispersed or internal phase and the continuous...
I finally got around to buying some cationic guar or guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride (sometimes listed as GuarSilk) a few weeks ago from Creations from Eden (also available at the Herbarie) and I thought I’d try it out in a few surfactant based products to see how it compares to my other cationic polymers (like polyquat...
If you are going to make a product that contains water or might be exposed to water, you need to include a preservative. If you want to make a preservative-less product or want to use alcohol as a preservative or want to store things in your fridge, do it. If you’ve read all that I’ve...
As people refer me to things they consider to be natural products, I keep seeing the words “coconut derived” beside surfactants, fatty alcohols, fatty acids, and other ingredients that are, in fact, coconut derived. But what does this mean? Coconut oil is often the starting point for surfactants because it has a fatty acid profile...