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.
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...
I realize these posts are a real blast from the past – they’re some of the first ones I wrote in 2009 – but I think it’s worth a re-visit to learn more about how fragrance and essential oils will impact your surfactant blends, including shampoos, bubble baths, and body washes. Fragrances and viscosityFragrances and...
In this post, Surfactants: A conditioning shampoo with SCI for normal to oily hair, Fatima asks: Can you tell me why another surfactant is needed? Wouldn’t this work perfectly fine with just the two? Great question! We use different surfactants blended together because each brings something different to the mix. Take a look at decyl...
Raymond really likes his 3-in-1 shampoo, conditioner, and body wash product that I originally made for him for his after swim shower, and I thought I’d make more for daily life without the swimming ingredients. I kept the ingredients relatively the same – I liked the surfactant mix I used and I liked the other...