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.
Yesterday we made a hand lotion using our esters…today we’ll take a look at making a body lotion by tweaking those ingredients. How is a body lotion different than a hand lotion? I like my body lotions to be thicker and more occlusive. So I’ll switch the cetyl esters for cetyl alcohol and change and...
We took a look at using esters in facial moisturizers, so let’s take a look at using esters in our lotions and creams! Why use esters in a lotion? Esters take a long time to go rancid, so your lotions would have at least a year long shelf life (depending upon the other ingredients). They...
Super Sterol can be used pretty much anywhere you’d use a regular oil, but as it is a lot more expensive, you might want to save it for those products where you want some serious moisturizing and skin barrier repair, like a facial moisturizer or serum. In this serum for dry skin, we switched the...
Super Sterol is a brand name for the product C10-30 cholesterol esters, and it’s produced by Croda. It’s derived from wool wax and shows excellent spreading and excellent adhesion properties. It is a clear, white to yellow, odourless oil like substance that is quite thick compared to other esters. Our stratum corneum lipids contain cholesterol,...
If you look under the section entitled “Links to Lists”, you’ll see there’s a change – I’ve updated the oils & butters section to be emollients – oils, butters & esters to include links to the posts I’ve been writing on esters. (I’m only allowed 10 pages, so I have to use them sparingly!) If you...