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.
Susan Barclay-Nichols I think Spectro-Jel might be a Canadian only product, but it’s been a very effective cleanser for my skin for years (until I started making my own – but I still take it on camping trips because it’s a great no-water-necessary cleanser!) It’s a lot like the Cetaphil cleanser we looked at the other day...
Oily skinned girls can use moisturizers, too, but they’ll need some serious modifications because oils are not our friends! I’ve written about creating oil-free moisturizers in the past, but let’s take another look at this recipe! The key to making an oil free moisturizer is – wait for it – not to use oils (you...
I love figuring out what’s in a product and duplicating it! I’ll give you an idea of how I figure out how much is in a product when I set out to replicate it. It’s based on what I know are the usage rates of the ingredients and where they end up on the ingredient...
If you have dry, wrinkled skin, we can modify yesterday’s recipe for dry skin by including a few more of those things wrinkled skin likes. Wrinkled skin likes emollients, surface smoothing agents, anti-oxidants, and AHAs, so let’s get that into our lovely facial moisturizer. Water phase: We can keep the water phase pretty much the...
I am asked all the time about how much emulsifier to use. If you are using Polawax, the general rule of thumb is to use 25% of the oil phase. So if you have 20% oil, you’d use 5% Polawax. If you have 30% oil, you’d use 7.5% Polawax. And so on. So why am...