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 wrote about the “unauthorized access” (aka hacking) of our XBOX account a few weeks ago – here’s the update. After another phone call to XBOX, I found out that it can take up to FOUR TO SIX MONTHS to restore our account (meaning four to six months to return our points to us, to...
The cedarwood essential oils from Texas and Virginia can be very similar, but there are different claims and different processing for each of the oils. From Leung’s Encyclopedia of Common Natural Ingredients (click here for the excerpt): Cedarwood oil Virginia contains mainly α-and β-cedrene (ca. 80%), cedrol (3–14%), and cedrenol. Other sesquiterpenes present include thujopsene,...
Caryophyllene is a bicyclic sesquiterprene found in clove (3.56%), rosemary (up to 8.3%), oregano (4.9%), black pepper (7.29%), and possibly cedarwood atlas. (1) ß-carophyllene is the major sesquiterpene found in pepper essential oil (2). It may have some anaesthetic effect, as found in this study. “In this work we studied the local anaesthetic activity of β-caryophyllene, one of...
What’s in a name? When it comes to cedarwood essential oil, just about everything! You might be getting cedarwood atlas (Cedrus atlantica), cedarwood Texas (Juniperus ashei), cedarwood Virginia (Juniperus virginiana), or cedarwood Chinese (Juniperus chinesis or Cupressus funebris, but I’m not going to be talking about this plant beyond this point!). Cedarwood atlas is from the...
Lemongrass essential oil some great qualities we can take advantage of in our products, so let’s take a look at a few! One study (click here for that post) notes that that it can be used at 2% in a shampoo – try that and see how it works.! Lemongrass contains citral, which can be...