The home of SwiftCraftyMonkey! 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.
We’ve been having some fun re-creating a safer, more stable version of this terrible HGTV recipe for a homemade cucumber body butter, and I thought after making the Simulgreen 18-2 version yesterday we could finish this series up with a Polawax version! Let’s use this formula for a body butter, which you can find in … Read more
This is a great question, and you’ll find a link to this post in the Duplications for Patreon subscribers section of the blog. The way it’s worked so far is that when someone posts a duplicate product idea, I take down all the information and analyze the ingredient list, then see if it’s do-able at … Read more
If the idea of a cucumber body butter appeals to you, but you didn’t want to create the separated, contaminated mess we met in HGTV’s seriously awful recipe, join me now to make an emulsified body butter using a few different cucumber extracts. We took a look at making anhydrous or non-water containing formulas for … Read more
I’ve absolutely fallen in love with cucumber hydrosol, and have been using it in my micellar waters and toners for a while now to get that crisp fragrance and soothing properties. It’s incredibly simple to use it in either product by substituting 10% to 20% cucumber hydrosol for any other hydrosol or in place of...
To ensure subscribers get access to the same exclusive content there are membership levels at $1, $3, $5, and $10 which you can purchase directly here on the blog. These were made to correspond to the levels on Patreon. With Patreon & the Patreon plugin becoming so unreliable there are similar membership levels on the … Read more
Let’s say the horrible recipe we met Saturday for a homemade cucumber body butter sounded appealing to you, but you don’t want it to separate or become contaminated in a few days, what could you do? If you wanted to make an anhydrous or non-water containing whipped butter with just oils and butters, you could use … Read more
I love cucumbers – they’re one of the only vegetables I will eat as I’m super picky – and I love the smell of them in all kinds of products, so let’s take a look at a water soluble way to use cucumbers in our products in the form of a cucumber hydrosol. The version … Read more
The horrible recipe from HGTV we saw yesterday used fresh cucumber juice as the water phase, which is a really terrible idea. If you want to incorporate all the awesome power of cucumber in a formula, consider trying cucumber seed oil. Cucumber seed oil (INCI: Cucumis Sativus (Cucumber) Oil) is cold pressed and smells absolutely … Read more
When you see a formula in percentages, simply replace the % sign with the word “grams” and you will have a 100 gram formula. In the formula above, this means you’d have 80 grams shea butter, 19 grams fractionated coconut oil, and 1 gram fragrance oil or essential oil. If you want to have 500 … Read more
Why does Mother’s Day bring out the worst possible formulas for bath & body products from companies who have no business sharing them? Last year we had the wet tea leaf contamination extravaganza from David’s Tea: This year, HGTV put out this recipe for “homemade cucumber body butter”. You can find my post from Facebook … Read more