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.
Don’t confuse guar gum with cationic guar gum – regular guar gum is non-ionic and does not offer any substantivity to your hair, and it’s a fine white powder, not a yellowy powder. It will, however, behave as a good thickener for our products. It’s water soluble and non-ionic, which means you can add it...
Here’s a little chemistry to start your day! Let’s take a look at colloids, hydrocolloids, and shear thinning. What is a colloid? A colloid is “a substance microscopically dispersed evenly through another substance.” It can be a gas, solid or liquid. It consists of two phases – the dispersed or internal phase and the continuous...
I finally got around to buying some cationic guar or guar hydroxypropyltrimonium chloride (sometimes listed as GuarSilk) a few weeks ago from Creations from Eden (also available at the Herbarie) and I thought I’d try it out in a few surfactant based products to see how it compares to my other cationic polymers (like polyquat...
The weather outside here is frightful, and I need something more than my toner to protect my skin right now. An oil filled moisturizer isn’t an option at the moment as I’m having some fun new break outs on my face, so I thought I’d try making my min-maxed toner into a gel using Amaze...
Yep, Amaze XT has some wet and dry detangling properties we can use to make some gel based detanglers. We covered a bit about this product in the building viscosity post on surfactants, but let’s re-cap and add a bit more to our knowledge base. You can use a product like Amaze XT (INCI: Dehydroxanthan...