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.
So what the heck are terpenes? We see them mentioned a lot in information about essential oils, but what are they and do they benefit us as bath and body formulators in any way? Terpenes are organic compounds, the major building blocks within nearly every living creature. For instance, steroids are derivatives of the triterpene...
As I mentioned, my lovely husband and mother bought me a pH meter for Christmas. It’s a Jenco Vision Plus and it’s quite fancy as it can store up to 50 readings, take temperatures, and many more features I have yet to try! It even comes with a handy dandy belt hook so I can...
A little bit more chemistry for a lovely December morning! The iodine value of an oil or butter is a measure of the saturation of the fatty acids. As we go up on the iodine value scale, we’ll see more double bonds or more unsaturation in the oils. Something like coconut oil, which has a high degree...
The recent cold snap we’ve been enjoying in southwestern B.C. had me thinking a lot about the effects of cold on our products, especially given that most of the ingredients in my workshop have either frozen or become so cold they won’t pour out of the bottles. I got to thinking about why oils cloud...
p wrote this really great comment in this post (it’s really long, so I’d encourage you to read the entire thing in the post as I’m editing it slightly for space): I’m in the minority here, leaving my sugar scrubs unpreserved…My reasoning is that any water introduced to the product will dissolve sugar until it reaches...