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 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...
Oleic acid (C18:1) is another fatty acid that shows up a lot in the oils we use in lotion making. It is found in olive oil at really high rates (78%) and high oleic sunflower oil (74%). It has only the one double bond, so it has a longer shelf life than those oils with...
Polyphenols are found in our oils in three major ways – flavonoids, lignans, and tannins. They are the structural backbone for most anti-oxidants found in plants, and we can use them in our creations to offer some awesome benefits. Polyphenols show up in most of the botanically based ingredients we use in lotion making –...
I realized I’m going to be writing a lot about our friends, the phytosterols, in the next few weeks, so I thought I should take a moment and post a little about them… Phytosterols are plant based sterols like cholesterol that give structure to the plant’s cell membrane (the way cholesterol does for our cells)....
As an introduction to looking at the various oils we can use in making our bath & body products, I thought I’d take a look at the various fatty acids on their own and see what they bring to the mix…and linoleic acid (C18:2 or octadecadienoic acid ) seemed like a good place to start....