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.
To ensure subscribers get access to the same exclusive content there are membership levels at $1, $3, $5, and $10 which you can purchase directly here on the blog. These were made to correspond to the levels on Patreon. With Patreon & the Patreon plugin becoming so unreliable there are similar membership levels on the...
Let’s say the horrible recipe we met Saturday for a homemade cucumber body butter sounded appealing to you, but you don’t want it to separate or become contaminated in a few days, what could you do? If you wanted to make an anhydrous or non-water containing whipped butter with just oils and butters, you could use...
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...