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 covered step one – choosing our surfactants – in this post. We took a look at how to make our product rinse off more cleanly in this post. I touched a little bit on pH in surfactant based products in this post. So it feels like time to create the basics of our base...
Yep, that tight feeling you get after washing isn’t about removing oils from your skin – although that can be an issue with repeated washings – but about the surfactant rinsing off cleanly! What has been shown to be an essential component of skin tightness is the film left on your skin after rinsing off the...
Why choose a surfactant based scrub over an oil based or emulsified one? A few reasons! Some of us can’t tolerate loads of oils, and a surfactant based scrub is less likely to be comedogenic or acnegenic. Secondly, you clean while you exfoliate, so it does two jobs in one! (Some would argue that the...
As we saw yesterday, we can make lovely emulsified scrubs for our faces if we tweak the ingredients slightly. So let’s take a look at a few more versions we could make! As a quick aside, doesn’t that look delicious? I’ve told the story before, but my husband looked at and smelled a batch I...
If you’ve been around the blog longer than five minutes, you’ll surely know one of the products I could not live without is the emulsified sugar scrub. I love the fact that it exfoliates and moisturizes my skin with the added bonus of washing off more cleanly than an oil based scrub. It isn’t much...