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.
A quick note about some things I found at Voyageur Soap & Candle! They’ve started carrying cetearyl alcohol, micronized zinc oxide (water or oil soluble), and a ton of new micas (the one to the left is blue lagoon mica). They’ll be carrying two new products in July that I will be running down to...
Why don’t incompetent people realize they’re incompetent? It’s a great question posed by Stephen Fry on an episode of QI I watched recently. The answer? The knowledge required to determine if someone is incompetent is the same as the knowledge required to be competent. So the people who are incompetent don’t have the skills to...
In this post, Anonymous asks: Hi Susan, I have a question about glycerin. I have read that it can act as a preservative, but the amounts I’ve read where it’s effective have been anything from 15-70%. I was wondering if I make a simple glycerin-water spray, with about 20% glycerin, if I need preservative or if...
One of the easiest things to make with any solubilizer is a water based fragrance spray. And one of the hardest things to do is to figure out how much fragrance or essential oil you need to use to have that oil disperse without having to shake the product. You can see from the recipe...
In this post, Anonymous wrote: Ok, this definitely bothers me. I hate when science people try to make nature people being seen as stupid. I thought science people were smart, but this just makes them seem childish and ignorant. I’ll teach you what “chemical-free” means. Chemical-free, in the natural and organic world, simply refers as a product...