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.
We’ve chosen a good recipe, we’ve assembled our ingredients, we’ve heated and held, and we’ve mixed! It’s time to add the cool down ingredients. What do we put into our cool down phase? (Click here for the original post.) We put in the ingredients that might be sensitive to heat, such as our silicones (cyclomethicone...
There’s been a lot of interest about mixing our products, and a lot of questions have arisen, so let’s take a look at a few of the comments from the post on this topic! Anonymous asked this question: Hi Susan thank you for the wonderful information so generously given here. After reading you post on blending...
After heating and holding, should we add the water phase to the oil phase or the oil phase to the water phase? My first instinct is to add the oil phase to the water phase as, generally, my water phase container is larger than the oil phase container. But then I read something two years...
pH indicators: You can get pH strips from your local supplier, and there always seems to be a great debate about whether or not they are useful. There’s always a place for testing your pH in bath and body products, but my experiences with strips have been spotty at best. I’ve tried three different kinds...
Let’s get back to our look at equipment! Mixers: There’s always this great debate about mixers – do we go with a stick blender, hand mixer, Kitchenaid, or whisking by hand? Yes. I went into a little detail in this post about mixers, and you can use any of those mixers listed above when making lotions....