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 get a lot of email asking me to convert my recipes into non-metric measurements. I can’t. I don’t have the time and my brain doesn’t think that way. I’ve been metric since grade one, and I measure in Celsius and grams. (Although I can’t figure out how to do height and weight in anything...
In this post, Art asked: In order to make a whipped body butter, I have been reading up about the benefits of lots of different oils. I have come up with a recipe that includes four different types of butters (avocado, mango, shea, and aloe) and about 7 different types of oils (olive, sweet almond,...
Check out this spoon scale! It’s $20 at Canadian Tire this week, on sale from $50. (It’s a Starfrit product!) It’s an interesting piece of equipment, and if you are working with volume measurements instead of using weight in your recipes, this is money well invested! You can measure out a liquid or solid ingredient...
My hair always feels softer after washing it on Monday morning. Why? It could be that I always use my intense conditioner on Monday. It could be Monday is exfoliation day (I do love my sugar scrubs!), which means the conditioner stays on my hair longer or that the ends of my hair get some...
If you’ve never made a recipe before, try staying as closely to it as you can. On my blog, there are generally a few different versions of the recipe to be found! Let’s say you like this recipe for my emulsified sugar scrub, click on the links in the post or click on the labels...