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.
Take a look at your local drug store’s shampoo aisle and try to find something just for oily hair. You can’t. It’s all for oily roots, dry ends. And this actually makes some kind of sense. If you have longish hair, your ends will be less healthy than the roots because they have been subjected...
As I’ve mentioned before, a light lotion is one that consists of about 80% water and doesn’t contain lots of butters or other thickeners. This is something you’d use as a body lotion or facial moisturizer as it’s not sturdy enough to handle being a hand or foot lotion. It works out to about 80%...
Yesterday we made a lotion with minimally processed ingredients, let’s make a body butter in a similar fashion. Again, I’m going to use an emulsifier and a preservative, which means I can’t have a 100% minimally processed product. But we can go for something on par with 92% minimally processed ingredients! So what ingredients do...
A few people have asked me about astringent oils lately, and the main question is “are they drying?” Allow me to recap a post from last year with a bit more detail… An astringent is actually defined as “chemical that tends to shrink or constrict body tissues, usually locally after topical medicinal application.” By definition...
At least once a day, I get an e-mail from someone wanting to make a natural lotion. I tend to answer this with another question – what do you mean by natural? Infuriating, I know, answering a question with another question, but apparently that’s how I roll. After almost five years of making my own...