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 What if you want to increase your oil phase further? You have two choices – you can choose another recipe that has a higher oil phase and a lower water phase or you can modify your recipe to increase the oils and emulsifier. Let’s say we take the recipe from the other day, the less...
While making our basic lotion the other day, we had a decision to make. Do we substitute 2% IPM for one of the oils or do we add it to the oil phase as an extra 2%? We addressed the substitution issue on Friday, so let’s take a look at increasing your oil phase today. ...
There are so many different ways to reach the goals I set out for yesterday’s recipe, and it all depends on your preferred and available ingredients and your preferred skin feel. Let’s consider our question about goals again, but tweak it a little for a different skin feel… What kind of product do I want...
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...