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.
Last year, Patrick and Will posed this question – what is the cheapest lotion you could make? We took a look at various ingredients we would use in a lotion and tried to figure out how to reduce costs. This morning, I found this comment from Catherine (click and scroll down to read the entire...
To follow up from this post – why do you think sulfates are bad for your hair? – I thought I’d offer a few links from one of my favourite blogs, The Natural Haven! (Thanks, Bajan Lilly for reminding me to look there for stuff on SLS!) She’s writing a great series on sulfates, and...
Thank you for responding so quickly and enthusiastically to the question – why do you think sulfates are bad for your hair? I really find the argument that some surfactants are using on degreasing floors to be a poor argument, indeed – we use water to torture people in wars, rivers can carve out things like the...
This recipe is based off this one, sort of, so read it first, if you wish! And I really encourage you to read this post first – facial cleansers for dry skin – because I really do go into most of the detail necessary for you to create a facial cleanser in this post! Then read...
We’ve created our basic body wash recipe and we’re happy with it…but we could tweak it further! (We can ALWAYS do more tweaking, but it takes real skill to know when to stop!) So what kinds of things we could do to this recipe to make it more moisturizing and what ingredients will increase the...