The home of SwiftCraftyMonkey Formulating Inc.! Join Susan as she obsesses about cosmetic chemistry and other things (some possibly related to monkeys). Often strange, occasionally useful, and always worth a stop as a point of interest on your journey through the Intertron.
I absolutely love using a body wash in the shower. If I formulate it correctly, it leaves behind a lovely moisturized feeling that lasts all day. The goal for a body wash is to offer cleansing without giving my skin that dry, tight feeling. So we want to create a body wash using a combination...
This is the last in the very long series of posts on surfactants before we get to some super fun formulating! We’ve covered the idea of increasing the micelle size and increasing the concentration of the surfactants, so let’s take a look at creating gels. There are a few ways to create a gel that...
The second way to increase the viscosity of our surfactant-y creations is to increase the size of the micelles. (Please click here for a refresher on micelles!) We learned in the post about increasing mildness that increasing micelle size can reduce irritation, so you’re not only building viscosity, you’re decreasing irritation! (I love two-for-one processes!)...
We’re getting ready to do some formulating, but we need to take a few moments to look at how to thicken our surfactant based creations. There are three ways to thicken a surfactant based creation – increase the concentration of the surfactants, make the micelles larger, or create a gel. (There’s a brief summary about...
Since I’ll be formulating a lot of surfactant based things in the next few weeks, I thought it wise to summarize surfactant links in one place – click here for the permanent page on surfactants! In addition, here are a few downloads on surfactants in PDF form!Here’s a handy dandy chart on surfactants so you...