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.
When we take a regular or clarifying shampoo and add a conditioning agent or cationic polymer like polyquat 7 or honeyquat to it, we change it into a conditioning shampoo. If you’re using a conditioner after washing, should we bother? Yes! It doesn’t take much to make a great impact – say up to 3% – but it makes a world of difference! Have...
On Friday, we took a look at other ingredients we might use in a shampoo, and these are the ingredients that we would modify or leave out when considering about designing a shampoo to be used in a line with other products. Do we need conditioning agents in a shampoo if we’re using a conditioner...
Yesterday we took a look at how to formulate a shampoo. Today, we’ll take a look at the other ingredients you might add to a shampoo to take it from good to great. In general, a shampoo contains surfactants, water, preservative, and thickener. Each one is a pretty obvious inclusion – the surfactants clean, the water thins the...
In yesterday’s post, Shampoo – how does it work?, we took a look at how a shampoo works to clean our hair. Today, let’s take a look at how one would formulate a shampoo, then at the ingredients we might find in one. So what makes a shampoo a shampoo? We want to formulate a...
The post, Should we design our recipes as lines of products?, put forth the idea that maybe we should be consider what we use together when we are making our products. Can we leave ingredients out or reduce the concentration of ingredients when we know what might be coming next? To that end, let’s take...