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.
Yep, it’s that time of year again (at least in the Northern Hemisphere)! It’s time to buy buckets of sunscreen and make sure Mr. Sun doesn’t make us all red and unhappy! We definitely need to be wearing sunscreen!There are two types of sunscreen ingredients – physical blockers and chemical blockers. The physical blockers are titanium...
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!)....
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...
I think Spectro-Jel might be a Canadian only product, but it’s been a very effective cleanser for my skin for years (until I started making my own – but I still take it on camping trips because it’s a great no-water-necessary cleanser!) It’s a lot like the Cetaphil cleanser we looked at the other day...
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...