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.
SwiftCraftyMonkey 
Why do we always say to package your product when it’s reached room temperature? Because we don’t want all that condensation in the bottle or the cap, which can happen when the product is even slightly warm. Before you know it, you have mold and other nasty things growing in the cap that’ll end up...
We’ve been taking a look at conditioning hair masks over the last few days. We started by analyzing Sephora’s hair sleeping mask, rose smoothing and anti-frizz version. Then, we analyzed Moroccanoil’s version in depth, and took a look at a few others very briefly. Then, we looked at the conditioning emulsifiers we might use along with some...
In the October Q&A post, Chelsea asked, Hey swift – I am super interested in azelaic acid and some in general information about it. I made sure to to check via the search first and didn’t produce results; though I hope I didnt accidentally miss this ingredient info on the blog. Thank you much for...
We’ve been taking a look at conditioning hair masks over the last few days. Two days ago, we analyzed Sephora’s hair sleeping mask, rose smoothing and anti-frizz version; yesterday, we analyzed Moroccanoil’s version in depth, and took a look at a few others very briefly. Each of these contains water; a positively charged or cationic...
In this post – Back to basics: Making your first lotion! – Leona asked, When adding preservative to a lotion master batch, do I add enough preservative to include the FO/EO? When figuring out how much preservative to use, we want to take into account all the ingredients in the formula. This means the water, aloe...