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!

Mango 'cado cream

I had been using the bit of my mom's cream I had kept to try out, and was quite liking it. I thought I might like to try to make something with a bit of a drier feel to it, since I'm a greasy sort of person to start with. I figured I'd give mango butter a shot; it's much drier feeling than shea butter when used on their own, and it would go well with the pomegranate mango fragrance oil I wanted to use. I kept the avocado oil as the liquid oil because I like it and it is not a super greasy feeling oil. I also decided to use a different emulsifier, choosing BTMS-50, which is supposed to give a more powdery feel, instead of emulsifying wax, which is more waxy. I substituted cetyl alcohol for stearic acid too, I wanted a more slippery lotion, and I hoped the cetyl might not make it as thick as the stearic.

My process for making it was the same as for my mom's cream. I'm evidently still a noob at this, because I got to having a bit of a panic as I was making it, worrying about how thick the BTMS-50 would make it (given my experience using it in conditioner). I thought it might be too thick to get the watery cool-down phase to incorporate nicely, so I added it a bit early, just under 50°C. I don't know if the extra bit of heat is the cause of it, but the fragrance I used has a funny after-smell to it that I'm not in love with. I've used the fragrance in soap before and never noticed it. Actually, that's a lie. I used it in a batch that I under-calculated the lye for, which I had to rebatch as a hot process, adding more lye; that one smelled weird when it was heated in the slow cooker.

Anyway, it's an okay cream. It got pretty full of air because I mixed it with the milk frother, and the bubbles are gradually coming out of it, making it settle in the container. It is thick, but not as thick as my mom's. And it is slipperier than hers too. I think I might like hers better though.

From scratch

My idea is to write a post for each product I attempt. These first few are going to be retrospective, because I've been at this about 3 weeks now. Prior to that I'd fiddled around adding things like niacinamide to commercially available products, with decent results, but this is about the things I really make!

My first attempt was a thick avocado shea cream for my mom. She's a shea butter fiend. She slathers herself with pure shea butter on a regular basis. However, she has dry skin; I had to explain to her that putting an occlusive product like shea butter on isn't going to do much to prevent moisture loss when you have no moisture to lose, that you need a product that combines actual moisture, a humectant to draw water from the air to your skin, and that favourite occlusive of hers.

So I designed her a fairly simple cream including distilled water, avocado oil, shea butter, glycerin, stearic acid, preservatives, and fragrance, all held together with emulsifying wax. My recipe was based on Let's make a thick cream! by Susan Barclay-Nichols, whose fabulous, science-y blog has been my main source of education.

If I'm totally honest, I was being a bit cheap with this recipe. I was realistic with myself about the very real probability of failure. So, I used emulsifying wax instead of the more expensive BTMS-50 emulsifier I also have, and potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate as preservatives instead of the more expensive Liquid Germall Plus. Liquid Germall Plus is a more complete and effective preservative than the ones I used, but I was making a small batch that I didn't expect to last for years, if it worked at all....

So how did I go about it? I put the oil soluble products, that is the avocado oil, shea butter, stearic acid, and emulsifying wax, in one clean beaker, and the water soluble products, the distilled water and glycerin, in another. I reserved some of the water in a little cup and dissolved the preservatives in it; they come in granular form and are water soluble, I expected the cream to be thick and didn't fancy the idea of trying to get them to dissolve directly into the thick cream! I also left the fragrance out until the end. I also tested the pH of my water phase (only aqueous solutions can have a pH), and adjusted it with citric acid to about 4-5, so that my preservatives would be good and effective.

The oil beaker and the water beaker both went into a double boiler to heat up and melt the solid oils. I only have one candy thermometer, so I put it in the water beaker. It had a larger volume of ingredients in it, so it would heat up slower than the other. I figured it would be safe to assume if the larger volume had reached the required temperature, then the smaller one had too. I heated the beakers in the double boiler to 70°C and kept it there for 20 minutes, per Susan's instructions, stirring each occasionally to ensure the ingredients were well mixed, and melted in the case of the oils.

After the 20 minutes of anticipation, I removed the thermometer, took the two beakers out of the double boiler, poured the water section into the oil section and stirred them together with a milk frother. Emulsification is pretty cool (I mean the ingredients are warm when it happens, but the process is cool!), the second you pour the two phases together, they become milky white and more or less homogeneous, no oil floating on water here! I blended for 3 minutes, or I tried to anyway. I had taken the beakers off the heat, so the lotion thickened super quickly as it began to cool. I mixed until my frother didn't want to mix anymore.

I set my mixture aside, putting the candy thermometer back in, to wait for it to cool to 40-45°C. Once it had cooled, I added the preservatives and fragrance. I chose nag champa as the fragrance because my mom loves it because she is an aging hippy. :) I kept a little scoop of the cream for myself, before scenting it, packaged up the rest and gave it to my mom. She really seems to like it, though I'm fully aware she likes most of the things I make due to some biological mother-bias.

For a first attempt, this really all went remarkably well! The cream emulsified and hasn't separated, nor has it grown mould or visible bacterial colonies! My observations of the cream were that it is very thick, that I can feel the water/glycerin component in that it feels kind of wet for a while after I apply it, and that the dry-down is fairly powdery and soft. My sister tried my mom's fragranced portion and thought that she might like it to spread more (it has a bit of friction thanks to the stearic acid) and that the fragrance was too strong. My mom likes the fragrance as it is, but her sniffer has been kind of malfunctioning lately (i.e. not able to smell things) and I scented it accordingly. I find it too strong too.

Yay, a success to begin my adventure!