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.

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!

Duplication attempt - body butter

I have some grand plans for xmas presents involving body butter, so a while ago I made a first attempt. I thought I'd go for a Body Shop-esque recipe, so I got out my mega-tub of mango body butter and copied down the ingredients.

water - okay, fine
mango butter
sweet almond oil
cocoa butter - oil phase should total about 25% for a body butter
glycerin
glyceryl stearate and PEG-100 stearate - this is the emulsifier, exact same ingredients are available as Lotion Pro 165 from Lotioncrafter or as Simulsol 165 from Windy Point, and probably elsewhere; usage rate is 1-5%
cyclomethicone - for glide!
phenoxyethanol - preservative
parfum - smellies, </= 1%
benzyl alcohol - preservative
methylparaben - preservative
propylparaben - preservative, these are generally at </=1.5% each
xanthan gum - thickener
disodium EDTA - chealator, 0.2%
sodium hydroxide - pH adjuster (if needed)
potassium hydroxide - pH adjuster (if needed)
citric acid - pH adjuster (if needed)
CI 75120 - colourant

I subbed in ingredients I had, using the recommended usage rates to figure out how much of each to put in. I ended up with a 25% oil phase, 15% hard oils and 10% liquid oils. I used Simulsol 165 as the emulsifier at 3.5%, added 3% cyclomethicome because I love 'cones, subbed preservatives for ones I have, left out the xanthan gum (perhaps foolishly), and left out the pH adjusters because I didn't need to adjust the pH. Scented with 1% banana coconut FO from Candora, and omg! I love this fragrance. It is what sunscreen would smell like in my ideal world.

It was a normal heat and hold process with oils and water done separately. Emulsification looked normal, but the lotion didn't thicken virtually at all as it cooled. Maybe leaving out the xanthan gum was a bad idea. It was so runny! It was also very oily when applied to my legs. I feel like the 10% liquid oil was too much by a lot. My legs are dry-ish and the oil didn't sink in for probably 8 or 12 hours.

Anyway, within 2 weeks the lotion had separated. I'm not really sure why, since the glyceryl stearate and PEG-100 stearate is supposed to be able to emulsify 20-30% oil at 2.5% usage, and I used 3.5% for 25% oils. Maybe it didn't like the preservatives or fragrance I used, or maybe it needed a thickener/stabilizer like xanthan gum. Who knows. All I know is I am addicted to that fragrance.