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 created a really basic recipe yesterday for a surfactant based facial scrub, and I think we need to take a bit of time to modify it so we can include mildness enhancers, thickeners, and lovely extracts our skin will like. This post will be about including humectants, then we’ll take a look at including...
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...
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...
When you’re making things like bubble bath, body wash, or shampoo, I encourage you to mix the product gently to avoid bubbles. Why? Because THIS happens! Two weeks later, and it still isn’t clear! And I didn’t think I mixed it THAT much! When we mix too much, we get bubbles. Not a bad thing...
We asked the question the other day, is it cheaper to make your own products? and I think we’re all feeling like it is. (Although the shipping is crazy…more on that tomorrow!) It might not be cheaper to make our own conditioner compared to buying Suave at the drug store, but it’s certainly cheaper than...