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.
I thought I’d try the light lotion with ceteareth-20 and glycol distearate as the emulsifiers. (I’m using this recipe for my upcoming experiment with Olivem 800, so it made sense to stick with the same recipe!) When made with Polawax or BTMS, this is a very light lotion – almost sprayable – that feels cool...
I know I recently wrote a post on this topic, but I thought I’d add a little more to it here… What is phase inversion? We know we have two phases in our lotions – the oil phase and the water phase (if you want more technical terms or to learn more about emulsification, please...
We can, in theory, combine any low HLB and high HLB emulsifiers to create an emulsification system. But there are reasons you might not want to use certain combinations. Perhaps you’re avoiding certain emulsifiers because they contain elements of something you don’t like. Or you can’t get your ingredients reliably or locally. Or you might...
All right, so we did a kinda basic recipe yesterday, let’s look at something more complicated…a body butter filled with various oils and esters and silicones.OUR MODIFIED BODY BUTTER RECIPEWATER PHASE42% water10% aloe vera liquid10% lavender or rose hydrosol2% sodium lactate OIL PHASE10% oils – 5% macadamia nut and 5% safflower oil15% butter of choice...
I’m going to take a lotion recipe you’ve probably seen before (in this post) and use this as a demonstration of how to use the HLB system to create an emulsifying system. Please click on this PDF so you can have the chart handy for the HLB values for the oil phase and emulsifiers. As...