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.
On Thursday, we met a new-to-me oil, tamanu oil! Let’s take a look at how we might use this in a lotion! As a note, I find the smell too strong to use in huge amounts in an anhydrous product, like a lotion bar or whipped butter, but you could certainly use it in those...
Glyceryl stearate SE seems like an old school emulsifier – we can use it with the HLB system as it has a value of 5.5 to 5.9 – but it makes lovely light, fluffy, non-greasy lotions with an elegant skin feel. It’s a modified version of glyceryl stearate, so it can be used as the sole...
Thanks for joining me for this aside on the idea of a product that contains water, like a lotion, can be “self-preserving”. There’s a post on Lush’s site – A beginners’ guide to self-preserving – that we’ll get to shortly, but first, we need to take a look at the idea of hurdle technology, “a term used...
On Friday, April 12th, we took a look at The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil certification. On Saturday, April 13th, we took a look at at the ideas of “derived from”, minimally processed, and the use of sustainable resources. On Sunday, April 14th, we took a look at how easy it might be to be green....
Way back in January, I shared with you this potential duplication for Saje Psoria Ease Healing Treatment Lotion. There were four parts to this series – analyzing the ingredient list, part one and part two, a prototype formula, then a modified formula – but I had to add a part five! I really liked that formula, which...