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.
Stearic acid is a great bar hardener, and I like to use as both a bar hardener and emollient in my body and foot scrub bars. Let’s take a look at the body scrub bar today and the foot scrub bar on Monday. What do I want in a body scrub bar? I want something that...
Stearic acid is a natural inclusion in a cream. In fact, you can thicken any basic lotion into a cream by adding some stearic acid. We took a look at a hand lotion yesterday. Let’s take a look at a cream today. Actually, let’s back up a second. What’s the difference between a cream and...
If you’ve never used stearic acid in a lotion before, this is the lotion formula I recommend as a great starting point. It’s a small variation on the basic lotion you’ll find in the newbie section of the blog, but it’s a great way to learn what stearic acid brings to your product. As I mentioned...
Poor stearic acid. It’s often overlooked for its glidier, silkier cousin cetyl alcohol, but this fatty acid is an inexpensive way to thicken a lotion, anhydrous body butter, lotion bar, and more. Stearic acid is a saturated, long chain fatty acid with 18 carbon molecules, which is to say it is a chain of carbons...
I’ve heard from a few people that gel toners are all the rage right now, so I thought we should try to formulate one. As an aside, I have turned a toner into a gelled toner in the past using Amaze XT, but I’m hearing that it’s hard to find this ingredient, so it’s time...