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.
One of the biggest disputes I see in lotion making is the debate over heating and holding our ingredients before mixing the oil and water phases together. I can give you several good reasons to join the heat and hold camp if you still think it unnecessary! Whenever I make a lotion, I weigh out...
What are micelles? They are defined as “an aggregate of surfactant molecules dispersed in a liquid colloid”. So what’s a colloid? It is a type of mixture in which one substance is evenly dispersed throughout another. There’s generally two phases – the dispersed or internal phase and the continuous phase. In the case of oil-in-water...
So how do we alter this recipe for the other skin types? Here’s our recipe from yesterday for dry skin…EMULSIFIED SUGAR SCRUB FOR DRY SKIN10% emulsifying wax or Polawax10% cetyl alcohol10% cocoa, sal, illipe or kokum butter10% shea butter30% soy bean oil26% olive oil1% Vitamin E2% fragrance or essential oil1% phenonip preservativeOily skin: This may...
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 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...