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.
Susan Barclay-Nichols Soy bean oil is filled with all kinds of wonderful stuff, and with one of the lowest prices for all the carrier oils, one that should find its way into your creations! I remember LabRat calling this the “Rodney Dangerfield of oils” because it has so many great qualities, yet it still gets no respect!...
Polyphenols are found in our oils in three major ways – flavonoids, lignans, and tannins. They are the structural backbone for most anti-oxidants found in plants, and we can use them in our creations to offer some awesome benefits. Polyphenols show up in most of the botanically based ingredients we use in lotion making –...
I realized I’m going to be writing a lot about our friends, the phytosterols, in the next few weeks, so I thought I should take a moment and post a little about them… Phytosterols are plant based sterols like cholesterol that give structure to the plant’s cell membrane (the way cholesterol does for our cells)....
In this series of posts, you’ll notice I’m using only one oil in my creations…I don’t generally do this in lotions as I like to have a blend of oils that offer exactly what I want for the weather, skin type, and application.A light oil will sink in quickly (or at least feel as if...
Facial moisturizers should be light, moisturizing, and slightly occlusive. I like to have a moisturizer that offers anti-inflammatory features because my skin tends to be on the red side. A facial moisturizer containing sunflower oil offers all of those features – although it’s not going to have a really long life span. We are going...