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 like cream cleansers. They feel really nice on our skin going on and we don’t generally get that annoying tightness after rinsing. But they don’t tend to play nicely with oily skin because of all those wonderful re-fatteners and oil based moisturizers. If you have dry skin, you’re in luck, though! If you have...
If you want a creamy exfoliating facial cleanser, but think yesterday’s recipe won’t agree with your skin, let’s see how we can modify this for other skin types! Oily skin: The jojoba esters may work for you if you have resistant skin, so you can keep those in if you like, although olive oil esters...
My best friend has normal to slightly oily skin, and together we formulated this exfoliating jojoba bead facial cleanser as a once-to-a-few-times-a-week cleanser to help moisturize her skin when she doesn’t feel like using a moisturizer. This recipe is good for dry to normal type skin. The cleanser itself didn’t take a really good picture...
Cleansing our skin is vital, and using surfactants can irritate the heck out of any skin type, but dry skin is particularly susceptible to stripping of oils when using detergent based cleansers. You can even get away without using surfactants if you have very dry skin (my mom hasn’t used anything except water on her...
Let’s make a lovely facial cleanser specific to your skin type. What are the general goals of a facial cleanser? We want to remove the excess oils and dirt that accumulate over the day without feeling overly dry and irritated. Ideally, we’d have something that leaves our skin feeling moisturized and conditioned, and we don’t...