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 admit I’m not normally a fan of unrefined shea butter. It can go grainy much more easily than the refined stuff I use, and sometimes there’s a smoky nutty kind of scent that doesn’t seem to agree with me. So I was a little apprehensive about using golden shea butter, sent to me by...
I had such great success with the yesterday’s black cocoa butter solid scrub bar, I had to try it in a sugar scrub! I figured the increased meltiness of the cocoa butter would be an awesome moisturizing ingredient, but I did worry it might be too melty in the container! Using this recipe, I figured...
Randi of Creations from Eden sent me this amazing black African Natural cocoa butter. It’s so much easier to chop into little pieces than regular cocoa butter because it’s softer with a lower melting point. My knife just cut into this cocoa butter – normally, I wish for a hammer when I’m breaking up cocoa...
Whipped golden shea butter I’ve purchased or been sent a ton of new supplies lately, ingredients with which I’ve never worked, so I thought it would be fun to do a kind of random series of posts on what I’ve been making lately in my workshop with those ingredients while I do more research for...
So what have we learned about esters so far? We’ve learned about the chemistry – click here for that post! – and we’ve learned they generally spread better and detackify other ingredients in our products, and can help reduce the feeling of greasiness from other oils. We’ve learned that some are oil soluble and some, like...