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.
The whole point of making our own hair care products is to keep our hair in good condition. This is a pretty subjective concept – my husband’s definition of a good hair day is when his hair is bone straight while my definition includes his lovely spiral curls – but it’s vital to how we...
I’m using my husband as an example for this post as he has lovely hair that goes all spirally at the ends. He washes with a shampoo bar and conditioner bar and leaves it to dry naturally. We did highlight it once – about 10 years ago – so we could put some purple in...
As I mentioned in the previous post, the shape of your follicles can have a great deal to do with whether you have curly or straight hair. As you can see, straight hair tends to come from very circular follicles, while curly hair comes from elliptical follicles. But there’s more! Any textbook you read on...
The shape of our follicles and the growth cycles determine the shape and length of your hair. Our hair growth is a cycle that depends on the season, your age, and your type of hair. We have about 150,000 hairs on our scalps – about the same for men and women – and our hair...
Our hair strands are made up of three main components – the medulla, the cortex, and the cuticle (there’s a lot more – and if you want to know it, please read the Royal Society of Chemistry’s great PDF on the topic – but there’s simply not enough time to go over every single bit!)....