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.
I love cucumbers – they’re one of the only vegetables I will eat as I’m super picky – and I love the smell of them in all kinds of products, so let’s take a look at a water soluble way to use cucumbers in our products in the form of a cucumber hydrosol. The version...
The horrible recipe from HGTV we saw yesterday used fresh cucumber juice as the water phase, which is a really terrible idea. If you want to incorporate all the awesome power of cucumber in a formula, consider trying cucumber seed oil. Cucumber seed oil (INCI: Cucumis Sativus (Cucumber) Oil) is cold pressed and smells absolutely...
When you see a formula in percentages, simply replace the % sign with the word “grams” and you will have a 100 gram formula. In the formula above, this means you’d have 80 grams shea butter, 19 grams fractionated coconut oil, and 1 gram fragrance oil or essential oil. If you want to have 500...
Why does Mother’s Day bring out the worst possible formulas for bath & body products from companies who have no business sharing them? Last year we had the wet tea leaf contamination extravaganza from David’s Tea: This year, HGTV put out this recipe for “homemade cucumber body butter”. You can find my post from Facebook...
We make all our bath & body formulas by weight because it’s simply more accurate. In the photo above, this is 1,300 grams soy wax before and after melting. You can see how much volume we lose as it melts, but the weight stays the same. If a formula calls for 1/4 cup or 60...