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.
You probably change your fragrances for the summer months, so why not tweak your ingredients to suit the climate? (In fact, you probably already do this in adding humectants and the like, so think of it as a possible selling feature if you’re in business?) I’m not a fan of hot weather, humid or not,...
There are two ways to make water soluble oils – you can mix an oil with an emulsifier (usually polysorbate 80) to make an oil water soluble or you can esterify them (okay, you can’t personally esterify them as you probably don’t have the equipment at home, but oils can be esterified to make them...
Yes, Crothix is an ester – in fact, it’s a complex ester! The INCI is PEG-150 pentaerythrityl tetrastearate (and) PEG-6 caprylic/capric trigylcerides (and) water. It’s derived from and composed mostly of stearic acid. It’s non-ionic and it will create clear thickened surfactant systems, as opposed to the pearlized systems created with the EZ Pearl (yesterday’s...
Esters are well known to be efficient thickeners. You’ll have encountered a few on your bath and body adventures – glycol stearate, glycol distearate (or EZ Pearl), Crothix – when making surfactant systems or looking for options for emulsifiers. (Crothix isn’t an emulsifier, the others are!) These are all PEG esters or polyethylene glycol based...
In my excitement about esters, I totally forgot about hair styling gels! I don’t use them much myself – my hair doesn’t really do “style” that well – but I do like to make them for my mom, who has really spiky hair. Gels are a perfect vehicle for conditioning agents. Sure, you can make...