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.
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Welcome back to this series on making oily gels with Sapogel Q (NatraSap Q™)! We met this ingredient – Sapogel Q (NatraSap Q™) – in our first post. In today’s post, let’s find out how to work with it! Before we start… If you’d like to see a video of this process, click here to...
An infographic on low to no shear mixers! These are ones we use to mix things for a longer period of time, like when we’re making oily gels or after an emulsion has formed and we want to hydrate the rheology modifier or add the cool down phase. As you can see in the graphic,...
Holy cow! Woke up this morning to the first proper snow of the year! It’s finally winter! Woo hoo! It’s been really crisp and clear here with highs of 10°C (50°F), which is not normal for west coast Canadian winters, so we’ve been taking advantage of it to visit places like the Chilliwack Community Forest, … Read more
Because we’ll be holding our first Zoom workshop of 2025 the last weekend of February on creating oily gels with Sapogel Q, Sucragel, and (possibly) sodium surfactin, I thought I’d share a series on each of these ingredients. If you were an Innovation level subscriber in September 2021, you would have received the e-book, Creating...
Woo hoo! Welcome to the first e-book of 2025 – Formulating fun with hyaluronic acid (featuring Oleo HA)! Join me as we create a number of wonderful anhydrous products – gorgeous body & facial oils, lip scrubs, multi-purpose balms, and never-before-seen formulas for creating pressed facial serums (and modifications, if you don’t have this ingredient)....