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.
So what exactly is honeyquat and how do you use it? Honeyquat is a cationic quaternary polymer – meaning it is a positively charged conditioning agent. It is different than the Incroquat BTMS that we have been using in hair care products in that it is a polymer and not a cationic compound, like the...
What the heck is occlusion? This is the way we prevent transepidermal water loss (TEWL) from our skin. (From Wikipedia: TEWL is defined as the measurement of the quantity of water that passes from inside a body through the epidermal layer – skin – to the surrounding atmosphere via diffusion and evaporation processes.) We want...
Isn’t this a beautiful molecule? It’s castor oil! This is a triglyceride – three fatty acids connected to a backbone of glycerol (glycerin) – the 3 oxygen atoms at the top. The zig zaggy lines indicate a carbon molecule and the OH are the hydroxyl groups we saw in yesterday’s post. Finally, the double lines...
If you’d like to know more about humectants, check out the humectants section of the blog where I go into far more detail than you see in this one post! Everybody doesn’t like something, but everyone likes humectants – if they know what they are! Check out this lovely urea molecule – carbon (grey), nitrogen...
I have a whole series of ingredients planned out for the next few weeks…but then I realized that I’d left out two important things…how our skin works and what it needs! So please join me for the next four days as I take a closer look at your skin, and the three things it needs...