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.
If you’re a dry haired girl, a 2-in-1 shampoo is probably a bad idea. It simply won’t offer all the conditioning and moisturizing you want in a product and might make your hair feel really awful. But it’s not for me to judge what is right for your hair, so here’s a modification to the...
Lalla asks in this post: Can I use cetrimonium chloride in a shampoo? Yes! (Well, that was easy, eh?) But wait, there’s more! Cetrimonium chloride plays well with surfactants, so it’s a great inclusion in a conditioning shampoo (especially one for very tangly hair) and it removes silicones well, so it’s a great inclusion in a...
I admit I’m not the biggest fan of the all in one kind of product – but then again, I have long, coarse hair that likes some serious conditioning without oils, so who am I to talk? – but we can make one by modifying yesterday’s daily use shampoo with only a few tweaks! Someone...
I am noticing a real trend in advertising shampoos as “strengthening” your hair. (I’m looking at you L’Oreal and Herbal Essences). What exactly does this mean? How does a shampoo strengthen? Well, it doesn’t. (I kinda of covered this topic in my post on L’Oreal’s EverStrong shampoo…) Using the right kinds of surfactants in the right...
How does a daily use shampoo differ from a not-daily use shampoo? A daily use shampoo is intended to be used every day, whereas a regular shampoo would be used every 3 to 4 days. It will contain about half the amount of surfactants in a normal shampoo because we don’t want to strip away...