Body butter reredux

I made my third attempt at duplicating the Body Shop's body butter. Attempts one and two were kind of fails. The second one was less bad than the first, but after I stirred the bubbles out of it some time after it had cooled it was pretty liquidy. It also got really hot here for a while and the body butter got even more liquidy and looked like it might be separating... or at least something was solidifying out of it. One of the oil-soluble ingredients probably.

Anyway, I switched from copying the Body Shop mango body butter to the strawberry. I left out ingredients that I didn't have (this only applied to ingredients found lower down in the list, therefore used at low concentrations anyway) such as strawberry seed oil, which is surely only included for label appeal, but stuck to the relative proportions of each ingredient as determined by the ingredient list. This one includes cetearyl alcohol as well as shea and cocoa butters, so I hoped thickening would be less of an issue than it has been up to now. Glyceryl stearate (and) PEG-100 stearate seems to be a tricky emulsifier. Maybe not as tricky as the conditioner/emulsifier, stearamidopropyl dimethylamine (I'm not linking to the bajillion posts I wrote about that, since, frankly, it makes up most of the blog at this point), but pretty tricky. Certainly much harder to work with than emulsifying wax NF and BTMS-50.

My hopes in this recipe seem not to have been misplaced. It thickened nicely as it cooled, although it is still not as firm as the Body Shop strawberry body butter (it is more similar to the Body Shop mango body butter in consistency, actually). We'll see, it may still firm up some more; it is only a few hours old right now. It feels nice on the skin, spreads well due to the fairly high cyclomethicone content, and smells great! I scented this test batch with a copy of BBW's rice flower and shea from Canwax.

Overall, pleased.


UPDATE - Sept 6, 2016: The body butter has thickened up a little more over the last day and a half. It is really nice. I think I might stick with this recipe, or a very similar one with maybe a touch more cetearyl alcohol. We shall see. I have read that it can take up to a week for products made with  glyceryl stearate (and) PEG-100 stearate to come to their final viscosity.

Also I love this fragrance.

Woot.


UPDATE - Sept 9, 2016: It's been 5 days since I made this body butter, and I've got to say, I'm loving it. It has thickened up quite significantly since it was made, and it's pretty much perfect. It is still not as firm as the Body Shop's strawberry body butter, on which the recipe is based, but I think it may actually be thicker than the Body Shop's mango variety. I think this recipe might be the one I stick with, at least for my xmas gifting plans. I could easily swap out a percentage of the shea and/or cocoa butters if I wanted to include some mango butter or something, but I quite like it the way it is. It has some lasting power if I apply it through the day; I'd say the greasy feel lasts about half an hour and I can still feel it until I wash my hands. However, when applied after a shower, my skin seems to be drinking it up. The dry-down is what I would call silky.

And yeah, the fragrance. Rice flower and shea is amazing


UPDATE - Sept 14, 2016: I still love it. In fact, I'm probably 2/3 of the way through my test batch, which is a definite indicator of how much I like it. This one's a keeper for sure.