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 don’t have any children in my house, but I have dozens of them at the library and on my caseload at work, and I like to make them little packages this time of year! Here are my three favourite things to make for kids! (As a note, consider making these items as presents for...
Today kicks off my family’s official holiday celebration schedule. We don’t start the Christmas season until December 2nd, the day after my mom’s birthday. As a just-about Christmas baby myself (December 21st), I’m very aware of the annoyance of having one’s birthday get lost in the Christmas chaos. So in our family, we don’t start...
I’ve been in the workshop a lot in the last week while making Christmas gifts, and I got to thinking (which can be a dangerous thing for me!). One of my favourites is a body mousse I found on the Dish forum, one of the first recipes I tried! It has six ingredients – water,...
A little bit more chemistry for a lovely December morning! The iodine value of an oil or butter is a measure of the saturation of the fatty acids. As we go up on the iodine value scale, we’ll see more double bonds or more unsaturation in the oils. Something like coconut oil, which has a high degree...
The recent cold snap we’ve been enjoying in southwestern B.C. had me thinking a lot about the effects of cold on our products, especially given that most of the ingredients in my workshop have either frozen or become so cold they won’t pour out of the bottles. I got to thinking about why oils cloud...