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 am so so so happy right now! I’ve been putting together this series on combining emollients for a very very long time now. I’ve been sharing all kinds of information with you on the sensory characteristics of our emollients, and I wrote an e-zine on the topic back in April 2020 – which honestly...
Join me for an all-new Zoom workshop this Sunday, July 19th at 11 am (PDT, Vancouver time) on solubility! Understanding what mixes with what is so vital to understanding how to create your own products and identify terrible recipes in the wild. We’ll investigate how our ingredients dissolve in water or oil as we make...
When we’re looking at INCI names, you’ll see things like stearate, palmitate, cocoate, and more. What do these names mean? When an ingredient is derived from fatty acids, you’ll see a name like sodium stearate or ethylhexyl palmitate indicating which one they’ve used. If you see laur- in a name, it means it’s derived from lauric...
I wrote this last year, but didn’t share it, for some strange reason. It was supposed to come after the ingredient entry for cream of tartar last November… So why use might we use cream of tartar (INCI: Potassium bitartrate) instead of citric acid? Why do I use it in my bubble bath bars instead of citric acid?...
Let’s take a minute to talk about viscosity. What is viscosity? The easy way to think about viscosity is about the thickness of a fluid. Water is thin, so it’s low viscosity, while glycerin is thick and has higher viscosity. I liked this definition that “Viscosity is resistance to flow” (reference), that more viscous things require...