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’ve been using glycol distearate (HLB 1) and ceteareth-20 (HLB 15.2) as my emulsifiers for these HLB posts, but you can use any combination you wish as long as you have a low HLB emlusifier and an high HLB emulsifier in the mix. Here’s what I have in my workshop right now: glycol distearate –...
Melian poses some very interesting questions in this post, and I thought they needed to be answered here! Bear with me as this is a really long post (not that I’m the Queen of Succint-land on normal days, but this one seems really long!) I’m finding disagreements on the hlb of a few oils. how...
Let’s take one last look at the HLB system for making our own emulsifiers before we return to duplicating products. Remember that if you make a change to any of the oil soluble ingredients you’ll need to re-calculate your emulsifier! If you’re going from one vegetable oil to another – soy bean oil to sunflower...
The one down side of using the HLB system is that you have to figure out the HLB of the oil phase if you change an ingredient (unless you’re substituting one vegetable based oil for another one, but even then jojoba could throw you off because it’s 6.5, fractionated coconut oil is 5.5, and emu...
All right! How did you do with yesterday’s challenge to figure out how much emulsifier to use in this recipe? Don’t worry – it wasn’t a trick question (I always hate those in math exams)! I’ve realized this was really silly to post this on Easter Sunday because most of you were enjoying your Easter...