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.
I love figuring out what’s in a product and duplicating it! I’ll give you an idea of how I figure out how much is in a product when I set out to replicate it. It’s based on what I know are the usage rates of the ingredients and where they end up on the ingredient...
If you have dry, wrinkled skin, we can modify yesterday’s recipe for dry skin by including a few more of those things wrinkled skin likes. Wrinkled skin likes emollients, surface smoothing agents, anti-oxidants, and AHAs, so let’s get that into our lovely facial moisturizer. Water phase: We can keep the water phase pretty much the...
I am asked all the time about how much emulsifier to use. If you are using Polawax, the general rule of thumb is to use 25% of the oil phase. So if you have 20% oil, you’d use 5% Polawax. If you have 30% oil, you’d use 7.5% Polawax. And so on. So why am...
As we know, dry skin needs a lot of oils, film formers, and humectants, so we’ll modify our basic facial moisturizer recipe to include those ingredients. This recipe will be suitable for normal-to-dry skin as well, as long as your skin can tolerate oils. Water phase: You can include some lovely liquids in the water...
Before the lengthy series of posts on surfactants, we were taking a look at different skin types. So let’s take a look at formulating facial moisturizers! I’ll be using this basic facial moisturizer recipe as our starting point. BASIC FACIAL MOISTURIZER RECIPEWATER PHASE 77.5% water2-5% humectant of choice0.5% allatoinOIL PHASE8% oils4% emulsifier2% thickenerCOOL DOWN PHASE0.5%...