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’m declaring April the month to try something different (at least for me, but you’re welcome to play along). I made a lotion yesterday with all kinds of ingredients I’ve never used before, and today I thought I’d make a new whipped butter. (If you want to know more about babassu oil, click here!) WHIPPED...
Dry skin has some difficulty removing the top layer of cells through desquamation, leaving a white or grey look to the skin from those cells that refuse to move! We can help them along by creating a lovely occlusive, moisturizing, and exfoliating sugar scrub we can use in the shower or tub. Because we’re using...
I ended this body butter post by saying there aren’t many variations on lotions, which might seem like a bizarre statement considered the probably millions of recipes you see on suppliers’ sites, manufacturers’ sites, blogs, and forums (that should be fora, right?). The basics of every lotion are oil, water, emulsifier, and preservative, but it’s...
I love love love scrub bars for my body and my feet. Like sugar scrubs, they offer moisturizing by trapping in water from your shower or bath after exfoliating all that non-desquamated skin from your stratum corneum. (Okay, I don’t really say this in real life. I usually say, “Pretty” or “Nice”!) So how can...
If you are a wrinkled or pigmented skin type, you might feel a little left out of the recent posts on toner and body butter because I didn’t go into specifics of formulating those products, and I apologize for neglecting you. It’s hard to take into consideration every single skin type possibility in a post...