just so totally rocked my own world

because i made lotion. like for real. like you could buy at the store. like feels really nice on dry skin. i remember i felt like this when i made soap for the first time - like: WHOA, awesome, i can do this cool thing!


lotion was insanely easy. oh my heaven was it easy. unlike soap, lotion does not use any "scary" ingredients like NaOH. but also unlike soap, lotion does use some specialty ingredients that i doubt would be available at your local health food store.

my recipe was based on bandicoot's ooh lotion with a couple little tweaks. i subbed in citric acid for the vinegar (to cut the smell) and subbed in shea butter, calendula oil, and soybean oil with vitamin e for some of the olive oil. otherwise everything else was the same. my batch was approximately 8 ounces (230 grams) and was as follows:

oil phase:
10g soybean oil with vitamin e
10g calendula oil
10g shea butter
16g olive oil
11g emulsifying wax
11g stearic acid

water phase:
14g honey
2g citric acid
143g water

3g germaben ii

8 drops lavender eo

lotion is just an emulsion of water and oils, like mayonnaise or salad dressing. apparently the key is the right proportion of oils to water to make the emulsion hold. germaben ii is a paraben-based preservative, necessary because the water is a nice breeding ground for germs and other nasties that might feed off the oils. i've heard you can make lotion without a preservative, but you have to keep it in the fridge and use it within a week, which says to me: what's the point?

to make the lotion, you heat the oil phase and the water phase separately to about 170º, then allow to cool to approximately 140º. add germaben ii. pour the oil phase into the water phase and blend with a stick blender until cool. i think i blended for about 10 minutes straight. almost immediately, the mixture turned thick and white and creamy and smelled lotion-y. i think it is the e-wax that gives it that lotion-y smell, because the oils and germaben ii smelled like nothing at all. i dropped in 8 drops of lavender eo (since this is for the kiddo, i didn't want to put too much - 8 drops in 8 ounces is hardly anything) and continued to blend.

i then scraped the lotion into a plastic baggie, sealed the top, and cut off the corner so i could squeeze it into lotion bottles. in the future i think i would use a slightly stiffer bag because lotion does not have much body. (to make more of a cream, you would sub in more stearic acid and less water, maybe 3% more stearic.) i used a fold-over-type sandwich bag because i didn't want to waste a ziploc but in the future i think it would be worth it. another way to get lotion into tubes is to pipe it in with a syringe, but in my previous experience that takes forever. so i did the baggie method. the idea was to be like piping frosting. i also cut the corner of the bag too big so it was a bit problematic but i think those issues are easily remedied.

lotion ingredients should be available online at pretty much any soaping website; i got mine from bramble berry and camden grey. i think i got all the bottles at bramble berry also though it was a really long time ago so i'm not 100% sure, but both sites carry nice packaging options.

i. am. AWESOME.