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.
Sebum can be our friend when it is protecting our skin from infection or fungi, protecting from friction, and reducing TEWL, but it can be our enemy when it’s causing us shiny skin and acne pustules! As you can see from this picture, sebaceous glands are located in the hair follicles of our body. The...
“Trans-epidermal water loss (or TEWL) is defined as a measurement of the quantity of water that passes from inside a body through the epidermal layer to the surrounding atmosphere via diffusion and evaporation processes.” (Wikipedia) This is a continuous process over which we have little control. It can increase due to disruption to the skin...
I see suggestions all the time that we really don’t need a preservative in products we might be using ourselves, and I find that strange, as if using a microbe-free product should be a privilege we reserve for other people! (And a bit hypocritical, if you believe there’s something inherently bad about using preservatives. You...
If you’ve just joined us, please check out this post on the chemistry of your skin before reading onwards… If we think of the corneocytes in the stratum corneum as “bricks”, then the stratum corneum lipids are the mortar. (The water soluble natural moisturizing factor is found inside the corneocytes; the lipid soluble stratum corneum...
Natural moisturizing factor (NMF) is found within the corneocytes, and makes up 20% to 30% of the dry weight of the stratum corneum. It consists of amino acids (40%), sodium PCA (12%), lactate (12%), urea (7%), ions (18.5%), sugars (like glycerol – 8.5%), and a few other things. These are water soluble humectants (meaning they...