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’ve updated this post with interesting things I’ve learned in the past two years. The original post can be found here. Your skin is composed of three layers – the epidermis, the dermis, and the hypodermis or subcutis. Our main focus will be the epidermis or the outer layer of our skin. I find it interesting...
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we describe our ingredients and products, and thought we could brainstorm to create a better vocabulary for what certain words mean when we use them to describe oils, fragrances, and such. We could create a glossary of terms here on the blog and in future e-zines and e-books,...
We’ve been taking a look at creating cucumber body butters over the last few days in response to the absolutely ghastly HGTV homemade cucumber body butter. I thought before we finish this series, we could make a light, lovely, fresh cucumber facial lotion. I know it’s not a body butter, but this cucumber seed oil...
This is why I love comments from you, my lovely readers! In this post on cucumber hydrosol, Allison noted: This sounds absolutely lovely, but $7.85/ounce for hydrosol?!?! Wow….it is times like these that I sometimes think that I have chosen the wrong hobby, especially given my limited means…. 🙁 We have definitely chosen a more expensive...
We’ve been having some fun re-creating a safer, more stable version of this terrible HGTV recipe for a homemade cucumber body butter, and I thought after making the Simulgreen 18-2 version yesterday we could finish this series up with a Polawax version! Let’s use this formula for a body butter, which you can find in...