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.
Coconut oil is a great choice for bath and body products. It’s inexpensive and it has some fatty acids we don’t find elsewhere. It has a really long shelf life – up to 2 years – thanks to all those saturated fatty acids. Virgin coconut oil smells absolutely of coconuts and is divine if that’s...
Making bath & body products are a great way to save money, but that’s hard to do when you’re just starting out and aren’t sure what to buy! As you experiment with different oils and butters and emulsifiers and surfactants, you’ll eventually find the ones you love, but at the start, ingredients will be your...
Making your own bath and body products is not a cheap hobby when you start, but it does get less expensive as you learn what you like and don’t like and eliminate some of the ingredients from your shelves. Let’s spend a few days looking at formulating on a budget! One of the first things you...
I’m not trying to be mean when I say I can’t come up with oil combinations for you because I really can’t! It’s all about your individual skin’s preferences and sensitivies, and learning what you can handle can take some serious time! If an ingredient is acnegenic, it can take up to seven days for...
As we saw yesterday, we can make lovely emulsified scrubs for our faces if we tweak the ingredients slightly. So let’s take a look at a few more versions we could make! As a quick aside, doesn’t that look delicious? I’ve told the story before, but my husband looked at and smelled a batch I...