The home of SwiftCraftyMonkey Formulating Inc.! Join Susan as she obsesses about cosmetic chemistry and other things (some possibly related to monkeys). Often strange, occasionally useful, and always worth a stop as a point of interest on your journey through the Intertron.
I’ve been playing a lot with isododecane, that very light, non-greasy, non-polar hydrocarbon we met the other day, and wanted to share another formula we’re loving around the SwiftCraftyMonkey house during these drier winter months! I can’t believe how itchy I’ve been feeling since the humidity dropped back in December. Yeah, I know, it’s like...
Isododecane is a hydrocarbon alkane with no double bonds. It’s a non-polar, oil soluble molecule that only contains carbon and hydrogen atoms. We can use it as an oily ingredient anywhere we might use natural oils or butters (vegetable, seed, and animal oils), as well as with esters and silicones. It’s considered an isoparaffin. More...
We first met this idea when we encountered that interesting thickening clay on Sunday, February 24th, then we took a look at hydrocarbons on Monday, February 25th. Today, let’s take a look at polar oils! So what’s the deal with polar oils? “Polar oils contain heteroatoms that differ in electronegativity. This results in a dipole moment....
This came up yesterday in our post about that interesting thickening clay, so let’s recap, then take a look at hydrocarbons and polar oils! You know how oil and water don’t mix? That’s because water is polar, meaning it has a negative charge at one end and a positive charge on the other, and oils...
I bought this ingredient last year from Making Cosmetics, so I thought we should take a look at it before formulating with it in this week’s Formulating Fundamentals Friday on fatty alcohols and acids. This is a fatty alcohol, like cetyl alcohol or cetearyl alcohol, derived from lanolin. It’s used in the same way, as...