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.
In the August Q&A, there were a few questions about different mixers! As an aside, I’ve been gathering all kinds of mixers over the last year that I’ve been testing to share with you, but I got bogged down because I wanted to set up my new viscometer so I had exact numbers instead of...
I can’t stop buying fragrances as there are just so many lovely ones! I’m definitely a foodie, but I’m trying to get out of my comfort zone by trying new ones. These are some of my newest ones. I thought I’d get a few opinions, so here’s who I had test them out! Raymond, my...
In the July Q&A, Marta asked, I was wondering how you handle your large (and growing) inventory of formulating ingredients. Do you truly discard them when they are beyond the stated shelf life? Perhaps you just know which ingredients you can store for longer than recommended. Or, perhaps everything is refrigerated (seems impossible). In knitting we...
In the December Q&A, Terri asked: My question is about recipe management and keeping ingredient inventories low but adequate to cover a given time period. I have been using a digital cooking app called Living Cookbook to create recipes and ingredients because it allows me to quickly scale them and create a shopping list when...
Amber is on fire this week! In Potential duplication of L’Occitane Immortelle Divine Cream (part four), she shares: I have to agree with the rant about products that contain tiny bits of this and that. I always, always wonder what the effective level is of each ingredient? I know some things are very effective at very low...
I admit that I’m a bit of a tool freak in the workshop. (Wow, that sounded way less suggestive in my head…) I love finding something that’ll make my life slightly easier when it comes to measuring, mixing, creating, testing, packaging, or anything else! One of my new favourite things is this giant fork from...
I’m very aware of cost these days as I’m getting into more and more expensive cosmeceuticals or ECOcert ingredients, and as of yesterday, I’m working hard to share with you a rough estimate of how much less common ingredients and formulas may cost. I’m also really aware as a Canadian that there might be all...
In Potential duplication of L’Occitane Immortelle Divine Cream (part four), Amber asked: What products do you buy rather than make, and why? We touched on this a little bit in the Discussion: What have you made and incorporated into your daily routine? but I think this expands on the idea of not making some things we...
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we describe our ingredients and products, and thought we could brainstorm to create a better vocabulary for what certain words mean when we use them to describe oils, fragrances, and such. We could create a glossary of terms here on the blog and in future e-zines and e-books,...
I remember the moment when I realized I made most of what I used in a day. I washed my hair with a shampoo bar, conditioned with a conditioner bar, detangled with a leave in, and defrizzed with a silicone spray. I used my own body wash, emulsified body scrub, foot scrub bar, facial cleanser,...