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!