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.
My lovely colleague and future columnist for the blog, the amazing Ginger of Neos Skin Care, brought to my attention that it’s National Sense of Smell Day! (Click to see her Facebook page!) I’m always a huge fan of Yuzu or white chocolate from Voyageur Soap & Candle Company, and blood orange & goji and...
Check out this video from Perry of Chemists’ Corner about the use of fear marketing in cosmetics. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it I’m honoured to be presenting a free beginners’ formulating course with him and Jane Barber of Making Skincare. Check it out on our course site, Learn Cosmetic Formulation! ...
Thought for the day: It’s not a good idea to store your sodium hydroxide (lye) or potassium hydroxide with your humectants, which draw water from the atmosphere. Doing inventory in my workshop today, we found a plastic box with a ton of humectants like propanediol 1,3, glycerin, sodium PCA, sodium lactate, urea, and Hydrovance all...
In the December Q&A, Donna commented! So many things to make! I just can’t decide. Sometimes I think I try to put too much into one face cream to simplify my routine. I call it the all purpose cream – good for moles, colds, sore a@#holes, fits, freckles and farts. When it comes to multifunctional products,...
There is a fabulous discussion going on in the November Q&A about how to figure out the volume of our products. I’m sharing the discussion here with some thoughts, and I hope you share some of your own! (I wrote about this a number of years ago, but I’d love to hear more about what...