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.
If we want to modify a body wash for dry skin, we have to remember the goals for this skin type – gentle cleansing that doesn’t strip our skin and moisturizing. We can do that in a number of ways… You can modify the surfactants to increase the number of very mild or gentle surfactants....
I absolutely love using a body wash in the shower. If I formulate it correctly, it leaves behind a lovely moisturized feeling that lasts all day. The goal for a body wash is to offer cleansing without giving my skin that dry, tight feeling. So we want to create a body wash using a combination...
This is the last in the very long series of posts on surfactants before we get to some super fun formulating! We’ve covered the idea of increasing the micelle size and increasing the concentration of the surfactants, so let’s take a look at creating gels. There are a few ways to create a gel that...
This is not my dog walking around the house with a conditioner bar in her mouth! I have a little thing I call my Trifecta of ARGH! When I’m on a webpage and it mentions that their products are “chemical free” or natural or they make an outrageous promise, I shut it down because I...
The second way to increase the viscosity of our surfactant-y creations is to increase the size of the micelles. (Please click here for a refresher on micelles!) We learned in the post about increasing mildness that increasing micelle size can reduce irritation, so you’re not only building viscosity, you’re decreasing irritation! (I love two-for-one processes!)...