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.
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!)....
Two definitions you should know when dealing with hair care products – what it means when something is substantive, and what it means when something adsorbs to your hair. (From the post “How conditioners work!” from July 25, 2009…) A conditioning agent (like Incroquat BTMS-50) is a cationic quaternary compound. It’s a positively charged compound...
Hair is a fascinating subject for me – with good reason, some might say – and it is the reason I started making my own bath & body products. I couldn’t find shampoo just for oily hair any more – it was all “greasy roots, dry ends” kind of stuff – and I figured I...