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.
This is the ferulic acid molecule as I couldn’t find one for rice bran oil! Rice bran oil (INCI: oryza sativa) contains 16% palmitic acid, 2% stearic acid, 42% oleic acid (C18:1), 36.6% linoleic acid (C18:2), and 1.5% linolenic acid (C18:3). It contains tocopherols at 400 mg per kg of oil, which means loads of...
This is a squalene molecule – note the “-ene” at the end indicating it contains double bonds. It’s found in rice bran, olive, and wheat germ oil, as well as shark’s livers! (Make sure the squalene you buy comes from olive oil and not shark livers – it’s unlikely you’ll encounter this problem, but double...
Petra wrote to me and proposed a challenge. Could we come up with a recipe to duplicate Lush’s Sugar Babe Sugar Scrub, a bath bomb like scrub that manages to remain hard enough to cut into pieces when dry, but would offer exfoliation and moisturization in the shower? Here are the ingredients…Fair Trade Sugar, Sodium...
Yeah, I know this is a leave in conditioner and I don’t really address this here, but you could think of it as a really liquidy conditioner for the purposes of having a picture in this post…Olive oil is fantastic in hair care products. Sure, you could use it in shampoo, but what’s the point?...
What benefits will olive oil offer a body butter? It’s moisturizing and regenerating for our skin, so it’s perfect for any application but especially after sun care. It’s absorbed by our skin well, so it’s going to offer quick moisturizing effects, and it’s going to offer occlusive properties to reduce the transepidermal water loss. The...