Lip balm

I'm a lip balm junky. I collected Lip Smackers as a young teen, and I've been totally addicted to Burt's Bees original peppermint lip balm for about 10 years, and was a fan of Blistex's Lip Medex before that. I've made lip balm lots of times in the past but never been totally satisfied with the outcome. I thought it was time to rectify that.

I tried to duplicate Burt's Bees about 6 months ago. I had the right ingredients, but it turned out way harder than I wanted. About 2 months ago, I rebatched the hard lip balm, adding more coconut oil, and got a really nice consistency but wasn't sure what the actual percentages were! The other day, I made an educated guess at what the recipe ought to be and tried it out with some new lip balm flavouring (mai tai punch, very nice!) I picked up from Candora.

Glam's Lip Balm Recipe
49% coconut oil
25% beeswax
24% sweet almond oil
1% vitamin E
1% flavouring

I melt my oils/wax in a little metal dish on low heat on the stove, but I would think microwaving/stirring intermittently would work too. When the wax and coconut oil are all melted and stirred in, I add the flavouring and vitamin E, give it a stir, and pour it into a lip balm tube.

A regular lip balm tube holds about 4.5 grams. I made a single trial tube (not quite full) by using 2 grams of coconut oil, 1 gram each of beeswax and sweet almond oil, and a few drops each of vitamin E and flavouring oils. It's a good way to try the recipe out to see if the formula is to your liking.

This is how full the tube is using the 4 g version of the recipe.

This lip balm is smooth (not grainy), of medium thickness (not too hard, not too runny/gooey), has decent longevity, and is not shiny.

If you wanted to make this like Burt's Bees, use peppermint oil for your flavouring, and, if you are making a larger batch, the tiniest bit of rosemary oil. One drop of rosemary oil in a single tube would be too much, so just leave it out if you are making only one or two tubes.

NOTE: Feel free to use this recipe, even sell products you make using it (you, of course, would be responsible for any liability for products you sell), just don't claim it is your recipe. Give credit where credit is due. If you re-post my recipe, please reference it properly and provide a link back to here. Enjoy!

Rosewater, glycerin, and shea cream

Wow, I actually had time to do a little alchemy last night! It feels like it has been forever!

I've been itching to use some of the floral water I bought a few weeks ago, and since I have about a million trial batches of micellar water on the go I couldn't excuse making more of that (although it will be a future project), so I made a cream! I thought the rosewater would add a nice light fragrance without including a fragrance or essential oil.

I used a very similar recipe to the one I used for my mom's shea and avocado cream, but I swapped the avocado oil for sweet almond, and replaced half of the water with rosewater. I also used liquid Germall Plus to preserve it instead of sodium benzoate/potassium sorbate.

I used emulsifying wax NF to hold the phases together. It has quite a high oil content, with 10% shea butter and 15% sweet almond oil, so it is quite greasy going on, but it is all absorbed on my hands (the main area I plan to use it) within about 30 minutes and the after-feel is soft and a little powdery. I quite like it; I knew I would because I liked the stuff I made for my mom! It is actually quite nice on the feet; once the initial greasiness has absorbed, it doesn't leave me with that wet-foot feeling I get from a lot of lotions (looking at you, Body Shop body butter...).

The only change I think I would make in an ideal world would be to either use more rosewater, or use a refined, deodorized shea butter, because I would like it to smell a bit more rosy and a bit less like unrefined shea butter!

PEG-6 caprylic/capric glycerides micellar water: excitement and frustration

My new order of ingredients came two days ago, and let me tell you, boy was I excited! When I got home from work and saw that the box there waiting for me was from Lotioncrafter, I pretty much dropped everything and busted out my alchemy equipment!

I had a recipe all ready to try out, with similar ingredients to Bioderma's Sensibio. It included distilled water, PEG-6 caprylic/capric glycerides (of course!), xylitol, cucumber peel extract, disodium EDTA, and a preservative. It was a simple one-phase mixing process, as there are no water and oil parts to emulsify.

As soon as I added the PEG-6 caprylic/capric glycerides to the water, it went kind of cloudy, which surprised me a bit, as the Bioderma formula is clear. I didn't worry about it, because the stuff I made with Cromollient SCE is also milky. I added in the rest of the ingredients. As expected, when I added the cucumber peel extract, the colour changed a bit. I'm using a powdered rather than a liquid extract and it makes things kind of yellow-y green. But it was fine and I mixered it all up.

I obviously can't leave well enough alone, so I tried it out right away. It felt okay, but not very much like the Sensibio. It was cleansing, but the dry-down wasn't the same; more residue-y, maybe from the cucumber extract or the gooey liquid Germall Plus I used to preserve it.

Anyway, within a few hours, I noticed something was settling out of solution onto the bottom of my beaker. I initially thought it was the Germall, since it looked pretty thick, but by the morning, the solution was clear with all the thick stuff sitting on the bottom, so now I figure it must be the PEG-6 caprylic/capric glycerides! What the heck! It's supposed to be a solubilizer, why is it coming out of solution?!

Clearly I need to have another go or two at this one. Sadly, it might not be for a while, since I have to help someone move this weekend and work out of town all next week. Boo. I guess I have time to contemplate what went wrong this time, since I still haven't figured that part out yet....

UPDATE Aug 28, 2016: So the strangest thing happened. I was more-or-less away for 10 days, so I just left this to sit. When I got home today, I mixed it up again with a frother-style mixer, and, lo! and behold, it is a clear solution! What the heck!? Did it just need some time, or did it just need some more serious mixing, or both? Anyway, I tried it again. It makes the same few tiny bubbles on the cotton pad as Sensibio (if you rub the two sides of the pad together), and it does not feel nearly as "residue-y" as I remember from before. Maybe the cucumber extract hadn't entirely dissolved before. Anyway, it is quite nice. Definitely an improvement on the last time I tried it. Perhaps a little more cleansing than Sensibio. Maybe they only use 0.75% surfactant in the commercial formula. Yay!

Polysorbate-20 micellar water - 2nd try

I had another go at micellar water made with polysorbate-20 tonight. I kept with my super simple testing formula as follows:

1% surfactant (polysorbate-20, in this case)
q.s. preservative (used 0.5% liquid Germall Plus)
q.s distilled water to 100%

It is nice and clear, and doesn't foam or feel soapy on the skin or the cotton pad the way the decyl glucoside and the caprylyl/capryl glucoside did. It seemed to clean off my sunscreen and day's worth of oily-face adequately. The dry-down is nice, definitely not sticky, maybe a little powdery, even.

Compared to the Bioderma Sensibio, I feel the polysorbate-20 at 1% may be just a fraction more drying. I wouldn't call it a drying cleanser though; my face feels less dry after using this than it does after using one of my old standbys, Cliniderm Gentle Cleanser, which is designed for "senitive, allergic, reactive or dry skin." I'm in no particular rush to apply a moisturizer.

Plus, it doesn't burn on my face like my last try did, since there's no Optiphen in it, wooo!

Verdict: I like it. This is a good option for DIY micellar water. Polysorbate-20 is a common, easily accessible ingredient, it's pretty cheap, and it does the job nicely. I haven't done in-depth research on this, but I haven't heard of anyone being sensitive to it (not to say it never happens, people can be allergic to literally anything). It's gentle enough that it is the surfactant used in Bioderma's ABCDerm H2O micellar solution designed for baby skin. I bet my basic recipe could be prettied up with all kinds of things like aloe or allantoin or panthenol to make something fairly decent.

I don't know how it works on makeup, since I rarely wear any (I'm definitely more into skincare than makeup). If you try it, lemme know how it does!

Micellar water update

So, I picked up a couple little travel-sized bottles of Bioderma Sensibio, since it is the gold standard of micellar waters, in order to have a reference point of what a commercial product is like when I am formulating. Wow, it's really nice! I could totally get over my squickiness about a leave-on surfactant product if it feels like that does... at least for one cleanse a day. I've got my benchmark!

Of all the formulas I've tried so far, I think the polysorbate-20 feels the most similar to the Bioderma, though I want to try that one again with a non-Optiphen preservative.

I also have grand plans for my micellar water recipes, and I haven't even got my PEG-6 caprylic/capric glycerides surfactant yet! I picked up some rose water and some orange blossom water from the international foods section of a local grocery store and I think I'll try to include them in some recipes. I'm so excited! :D

Linen spray

So this one is not really a cosmetic, but it would be if I sprayed it on my body instead of on my sheets! It's got the same ingredients as if I were to make a scented body spray (minus any nice things I might add, like aloe or panthenol).

It is crazy-simple to make, just four ingredients: fragrance, solubilizer, water, and preservative!

My recipe was as follows:

1% fragrance oil
1% solubilizer (I used polysorbate-20)
q.s. preservative (I used Optiphen Plus, since it's not going on my skin... my skin doesn't like Optiphen Plus, and I have a bunch of it that needs to get used up somehow.)
q.s. distilled water to 100%

Mix and pour into a spray bottle.

That's it.

I scented mine with a clone of Johnson's Baby Bedtime Bath fragrance from Indigo Scents. It's more lavender-y than I was hoping, although it could be totally true to the North American version of the fragrance, which I'm not familiar with. I was hoping it would be a dupe for some Johnson's baby talco para antes de dormir (bedtime baby powder, for those who don't read Spanish), that I brought home from South America, which I love the scent of. It's not that similar, really. The South American stuff definitely contains lavender, but is also a bit... fruity? It's hard to place, but it's lovely.

It's funny how scents vary internationally. Even the original Dove bar has a different fragrance for markets outside of North America, although I know from experience the European and South American versions smell the same. Personally, I prefer the North American version, as I'm a fan of powdery smells, but the international version is similarly clean, mild, and soapy smelling. I've found the international version of the Dove in dollar stores here in Canada... some wayward imports, perhaps?

Polysorbate-80 micellar water

The one solubilizing surfactant I own that I haven't tried in a micellar water yet: polysorbate-80.

I've continued on with my stripped down testing method, making the micellar water with just distilled water, 1% surfactant, and preservative.

Maybe 1% surfactant is not enough, or maybe polysorbate-80 is just a sticky one, but my skin feels moist and not terribly clean after using this product. I must say that it is a good-looking product though, making a nice, clear solution.

I have to say, so far I prefer polysorbate-20 and PEG-40 hydrogenated castor oil to the others I've tried. But... I just ordered some PEG-6 capric/caprylic triglyceride from Lotioncrafter (why they've trade-named it SurfPro CC-6, I'll never understand, it makes it so hard to find). This surfactant is the one used in the celebrated Bioderma Sensibio/Crealine, so I have high expectations even though I haven't tried the original. (Hint: Watch for a Sensibio dupe attempt coming up once I receive my ingredients!)

My biggest ever batch of soap

This post is going to be a little diversion into soap making, since I do that too and made kind of a milestone batch last night. Generally I made really small batches, my regular loaf mould makes 5 100 g bars, plus I like the variety of making lots of different fragrances and colours. I think the biggest batch I have ever made was about 700 g. However, I recently got a wholesale order from a friend who wants to felt the soap and sell it at craft fairs. She ordered 2400 g of the same fragrance... and of course it is plain and uncoloured because it is going to be inside its little felt cocoon. So I made an enormous 2400 g batch of soap last night. 2400 g is just the oils, the water increases the weight too, but some of that will evaporate off in the curing process.

I initially put the oils in an 8-cup measuring cup, but by the time I got to the final oil I had to move them to my stockpot, there just wasn't enough room. I moulded it in a shoe box that once held hikers....

It is fragranced with oatmeal, milk, and honey from Voyageur. I really like that FO and had sort of been hoarding it, but I had to use up almost all of my supply in this batch. That is the price of doing business I guess! I will have to buy more. :)

I am excited to cut the soap tonight. I still haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do it, maybe I will cut it into loaves so I can use my wire cheese slicer cutting board to cut the bars like I normally do.

I have to make two more smaller batches, one lavender and one patchouli, for the same friend, plus I have orders for another patchouli loaf and a mint/nag champa with pumice loaf (for someone who has really weird soap preferences ;) ). I fear I am going to run out of my base oils before I make all of these.... Why does everyone want soap now that all I want to make is body butter?! It's a good problem to have.

Oil-based cleansing balm, and a possible revelation

I've been reading skin care stuff online as one does, and have come across oil-based cleansing balms a few times now. The Eve Lom product piqued my interest, because who the hell spends the UK equivalent of $100 on 100 ml of cleanser?! It also interested me because Eve Lom is a facecloth advocate, and I think facecloths are quaint. Another balm and facecloth champion is Caroline Hirons, a UK celebrity esthetician and blogger with about a million loyal minions.

The whole oil cleansing thing seems so bizarre to me, especially as a sensitive, oily, acne-prone skinned person who wholly refused to moisturize until I started using a prescription retinoid 2 years ago. I understand, and agree with, the chemical principle of like dissolving like, but... residue! How are you supposed to get all that residual oil off your skin without following up your oil cleanse with a proper cleanser?! Ain't nobody got time for that! I tried oil cleansing a whole of one time. I believe I mixed up 7 g of grapeseed oil and 3 g of castor oil (supposedly a good mix for oily skin), rubbed it on my face, and then scrubbed the bejesus out of my skin with a facecloth trying to get all the oil off. I'm pretty sure that within 30 minutes I had gone back and re-cleaned my face with a normal surfactant-based cleanser. It just wasn't for me.

So I read the ingredients of the Eve Lom stuff. Colour me skeptical when I saw that the first ingredient is mineral oil. Cheapest. Ingredient. Ever. Anyway, I kept reading and saw that her product contains not just oils, but also emulsifiers (a couple different PEG lanolins). That's where I started to see the light. I still think that the "all natural" oil cleansing is kind of bunk, especially for oily-skinned people, but if you add an emulsifier to your cleansing oil, that will increase its solubility - and therefore rinse-ability - in water. So it might actually come off your skin.

I decided to have another go at this oily nonsense, so I whipped up a super-simple pseudo-dupe of the Eve Lom cleanser, complete with 75% mineral oil. I substituted PEG-40 castor oil for the PEG lanolins, since it's the most similar emulsifier I have, and threw in some cetearyl alcohol and cocoa butter. I added the tiniest amount of clove and eucalyptus essential oils, and that was it.

Per the instructions of both Eve Lom and Caroline Hirons, I applied the stuff (similar consistency to Burt's Bees hand salve, if you are familiar with that) to my dry face and gave it a good rubbing-in. It felt oily. I wet a facecloth in hot water, wrung it out, and held it over my face for a few seconds. I repeated this step a few times, since the heat is supposedly essential for oily skin as it allows the cleanser to penetrate into my greasy pores. Following that I used my hot, wet facecloth to scrub the cleanser off, rinsing it a few times along the way. Lo and behold, my skin felt clean! Not oily! It was pretty remarkable. I felt like the balm rinsed cleanly off my hands too, and my facecloth did not feel like it was saturated in oil after rinsing. All so unexpected.

After drying my face off with a towel and giving it a few minutes to evaporate off the leftover moisture, I touched my skin. It felt really, incredibly soft.

Anyway, I've been at this for a few days now and haven't had any catastrophic results yet. I'll update if my acne explodes or anything, likewise if my skin suddenly becomes my best feature (a girl can dream, right?).

A note on facecloths: I've tried using them in the past, as my skin doesn't seem to react too well to the high levels of alcohol contained in most chemical exfoliants. I've always found that the added stimulation increases my oil production, and since starting prescription acne meds 2 years ago, I have stuck to hands-only cleansing with surfactant-based sensitive skin cleansers (either Cliniderm gentle cleanser or Cerave foaming cleanser). This system has worked quite well for me in combination with the meds, and Cliniderm protective lotion SPF 45 in the day or Spectro blemish-prone moisturizer overnight. I'm still using my meds and moisturizers and will switch back to my cleanser system if I have any problems... and probably when I run out of this balm, at least until I finish up the products that I already have.

UPDATE (Aug 8, 2016): So, after about 3 days of using this, I was developing 2 new pimples on my chin, boo. I went back to a regular cleanser the evening of Aug 5 and haven't had any new ones appear since then. Oh well, I only have one application of this stuff left anyway, maybe I'll use it up as a pre-cleanse and be done with it.

Blue shampoo

I ran out of my rhubarb shampoo a while ago, so I thought I'd make some more. I used basically the same recipe, although I reduced the panthenol a bit and added 0.5% glycol distearate, since I liked it so much in my sister's all-in-one wash. Other than that, just the colour and fragrance are different.

This time I went with blue colourant, as I think it goes nicely with the Crabtree and Evelyn's Nantucket Briar clone FO from Canwax that I used. I wasn't 100% impressed with all the FOs I ordered from them (toffee treats smells like burnt sugar and dissapears in CP soap while making the soap weirdly soft and sticky), but this one is pretty killer. Although I see the irony in describing the quintessential old lady fragrance as "pretty killer." I love it. I drink tea and smell like a grandma. :D

A second try at body butter

Following my last fairly miserable, if deliciously scented, failure, I made another attempt at duplicating the Body Shop's mango body butter recipe. The last one was way too oily and thin (and ended up separating), so this time I reduced the oil by 75% and doubled the proportion of mango butter. I still kept the relative proportions of ingredients in line with the Body Shop's ingredient list, since I am a sucker for punishment.

I also tried adding xanthan gum this time. I mixed it with my water as the first step in my formulation and let it hydrate for 15 minutes or so. Considering that I only made a 50 g sample batch, measuring out the 0.2% (i.e. 0.1 g) of xanthan gum was an inexact thing. My scale measures to 0.01 g, but I'm sure the accuracy is not that good, and it doesn't like sensing much under about 0.5 g, so I got it to measure 0.2 g and then removed about half of the xanthan gum in the dish. Honestly, the "gel" it created was hardly a gel, it was only marginally thicker than water. Anyway, I used it.

Once again, this was a regular heat and hold lotion process, and everything went normally. I added the silicone, fragrance, disodium EDTA, preservative, and colourant after cool-down. This one took its time thickening up, probably 24 hours before it reached its final consistency. This body butter, like the last, is thinner than I want, although this recipe was a marked improvement over the previous one. It is solid enough not to move when the jar it is in is turned upside down, but feels really thin when applying.

As an aside on the fragrance, I used a guava fig fragrance from Candora Soap, which smells freaking amazing, but sadly has that same weird after-smell as my rhubarb fragrance from Saffire Blue, and my pomegranate mango fragrance from New Directions Aromatics. Boo. I expect it will be better off in a wash-off product, as the rhubarb did well in shampoo.

I have decided that my next attempts at body butter will contain thickeners other than the butter and emulsifier. I've read the ingredient lists on some of the other Body Shop body butter flavours I own, and many of the others contain cetearyl alcohol, so I think I'll be adding some of that on the next go. It's a learning process!

Gersh-wash 2.0

My sister liked the last all-in-one wash I made her and she is running out, so she requested a refill, this time in sandalwood flavour.

I made a few modifications: I decreased the glycerin from 15% to 3%, to see if it made much of a difference, and reduced the glycol distearate from 1.5% to 0.5% in hopes of boosting the foaminess. I also left out the hydrolyzed silk protein to make it a more vegan-friendly product; she's not vegan, but pretty close.

This time I also had Crothix to thicken it, so the need to use so much glycol distearate for thickening purposes was not a factor. 0.5% Crothix was required to thicken in to a similar consistency as the last batch with the additional GD.

This process included a heated water phase and a cool-down phase only, as there is no emulsification to do here. The gylcol distearate is a waxy solid though, so requires thorough heating to melt and incorporate.

The reduced glycol disteaerate made a noticeable visual difference in the formula. The last batch with 1.5% was more-or-less opaque. This time with 0.5%, it is pearly and quite gorgeous.

I made a 300 g batch to fill a 250 ml bottle with the hopes of having a bit left over for me. That didn't really happen. I filled the bottle to the top, and had enough left over for a single shower. Oh well, I still got to try it. It foamed up really nicely on my bath pouf, much more than the last version, and of course smelled fabulous with the sandalwood FO.

I think this recipe is a winner, and may become my basic body wash recipe that I can tweak as desired.