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 just learned the most interesting thing from Liz at the Dish and I have to share it! Have you ever considered whether you should pour the water into the oil or the oil into the water when you’re making lotions? I usually add the water to the oil because the water phase is always...
Yes, Crothix is an ester – in fact, it’s a complex ester! The INCI is PEG-150 pentaerythrityl tetrastearate (and) PEG-6 caprylic/capric trigylcerides (and) water. It’s derived from and composed mostly of stearic acid. It’s non-ionic and it will create clear thickened surfactant systems, as opposed to the pearlized systems created with the EZ Pearl (yesterday’s...
Esters are well known to be efficient thickeners. You’ll have encountered a few on your bath and body adventures – glycol stearate, glycol distearate (or EZ Pearl), Crothix – when making surfactant systems or looking for options for emulsifiers. (Crothix isn’t an emulsifier, the others are!) These are all PEG esters or polyethylene glycol based...
In my excitement about esters, I totally forgot about hair styling gels! I don’t use them much myself – my hair doesn’t really do “style” that well – but I do like to make them for my mom, who has really spiky hair. Gels are a perfect vehicle for conditioning agents. Sure, you can make...
So what the heck is an ester and how or why would I want to use them in our bath and body creations? An ester is a molecule that has undergone esterification. (Wow, that was clear, eh?) Esterification is a chemical reaction – for our purposes between a carboxylic acid (like a fatty acid from...