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.
This isn’t the end of the series on hair care products, just a detour into the land of other bath and body products. If you’ve been making conditioners, then you have all the goodies to make other products. And if you’ve been making conditioners, you’ve been making lotions and might not have known it! Over...
I love conditioner bars! They travel well, don’t over-condition, and aren’t hard to make! In short, they’re awesome! I’ve written a great deal about conditioner bars in the past (including a visual tutorial), so I’ll offer you those links now so you can see where the recipe originates, then we’ll do some tweaking. Formulating a...
We’ve already seen what cationic polymers like honeyquat or polyquat 7 can do for a shampoo, so let’s take a look at using these as leave in conditioners suitable for fine hair or children’s hair. The cationic polymers are less conditioning than the cationic quaternary compounds like BTMS-50 or cetrimonium bromide, but they can offer...
Yep, Amaze XT has some wet and dry detangling properties we can use to make some gel based detanglers. We covered a bit about this product in the building viscosity post on surfactants, but let’s re-cap and add a bit more to our knowledge base. You can use a product like Amaze XT (INCI: Dehydroxanthan...
We’re on a four day road trip of super holiday camping fun, leaving this morning for the wonderful Potholes State Park near Moses Lake, Washington and returning late on July 1st. We’ll be enjoying some fire roasted food, lots of swimming, a short trip for shopping in Spokane, a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, and...