The home of SwiftCraftyMonkey Formulating Inc.! 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.
I get e-mails and comments all the time asking if something is better than something else (for instance, if one preservative is “better” than another) or if an ingredient is bad. I’m not really sure what those words mean any more, hence this very short series on maligned ingredients (which will continue in the near...
So what are phthalates? They are esters of phthalic acid (an aromatic dicarboxylic acid) used as plasticizers, emulsifiers, and lubricants. They have low water solubility, high oil solubility, and low volatility. They’re found in fragrances, nail polishes, and many other cosmetic ingredients. They are suspected of being endocrine disruptors, that is to say they “interfere...
Fragrances show up a lot in various reports about ingredients we should avoid in our cosmetics, and there are a few reasons why this might be. One of the main concerns is that not all the fragrances or components of a fragrance are listed (although in the EU it appears they list all the various...
Many of the complaints about ethoxylated ingredients – those that have gone through the ethoxylation process, when ethylene oxide is added to fatty acid alcohols to give them detergent properties, to turn them into surfactants, like SLeS, our PEG esters, and things like ceteareth-20 – is that they contain 1,4 dioxane. A report put out by...
A lot of the concerns about mineral oil relate to occlusion. (One quote is that it “coats the skin like plastic, clogging the pores”.) If you’ve read any tiny bit of this blog, you know that occlusion is a good thing that helps reduce transepidermal water loss, and that mineral oil isn’t the only thing that causes occlusion. Great...