Ingredients to Make Lotion

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Ingredients to Make Lotion

We're going to talk about lotions and making balms. The best thing about making your own lotions from scratch and your own balms from scratch is that you get to pick your own ingredients. So if you want to make something for sensitive skin, for baby's skin, for your own, say you love to ski and you're like I really need a protective balm to protect myself from wind factor, you can make it yourself and I'm going to show you how. Once we get the basics down, so I'm going to go over everything from ingredients to preservatives to how to make sure you're making products safely. Then we're going to get into this and actually make two recipes today. I'm going to show you how to make a lotion and I'm going to show you how to make a balm or a body butter. So what is a lotion? A lotion is basically water plus oils and butters plus emulsifiers but let's dig a little bit deeper. What your lotion feels like really depends on the proportion of the ingredients you use. So, for example, you could hav...

e the same five ingredients but use them in different proportions. More water in one, more butters in another, more waxes in another and they would feel completely different. In this course we're going to talk about additional ingredients as well like preservatives, colorants, fragrance oils, essential oils, and extracts. So we can really dive into how to make lotions your own. Remember how I said you can do a different feel depending on the ingredient percentages you're using? Lotions have kind of a range. When you're dealing with a lotion, they tend to be around 70 to 80 percent distilled water. Why distilled water? Well, distilled water is really, really important when you're manufacturing any beauty product because tap water often has heavy metals that come from the piping systems and might have some impurities and might not be as clean as you need it to be for your bath and body products. So always use distilled water and then we use three to six percent emulsifying wax and so this is the first thing that is really an important part of lotions. This is oil and water. If you try and mix them together they don't stay mixed. They sort of suspend but then you will see the oils start to float to the surface. Emulsifying wax is the ingredient that attaches to both the oil and the water allowing them to bind together. You cannot make lotion without an emulsifier or an emulsifying wax. And we'll talk about the different types of emulsifying waxes and how, and what properties they give in just a few minutes. Generally you want to max, max, max out your emulsifying wax at about six percent. Most lotions start at about three percent and the reason that you kind of want to max out at six percent is because if you use too much emulsifying wax, you will end up with kind of a hard, waxy, not spreadable consistency. But that is, so three to six percent is your range for emulsifying waxes. Stearic acid, I know this has a really scary name right? It's got the name acid in it. It's actually just derived from palm oil and what it adds, it's a hardening agent and it also adds to the fluffiness of the lotion. So when you add the lotion, if you don't want it to feel kind of heavy and sticky and weighing down, the stearic acid really helps for that and that's usually used in about three to five percent range. 10 to 25 percent oils and butters and this is where you really get to personalize your recipe. Everything from cocoa butter to shea butter to mango butter to avocado oil to olive oil to sweet almond oil to tomato oil to evening primrose oil. So many different opportunities for you to customize and personalize your lotion. Those are used in 10 to 25 percent and you're like we'll that's a very, very big range. This is where that percentage thing matters. So for example, if you decide you really wanted a very thick lotion, you could use all the way up to 25 percent shea butter, right? Shea butter is solid at room temperature. In your lotion, it would provide a much more solid dense product than if you use say 25 percent avocado oil which is liquid at room temperature. It's really important that when you're making lotions that you kind of play with your proportions and figure out like what works for me with my skin in Washington State isn't necessarily going to work for you with your skin in your state and of course, as we age, our skins do need different amounts of moisture. And then finally, it's point five to one percent preservative, which we'll talk about in just a minute and about point five percent fragrance. So why not more fragrance, right? Soap uses almost up to five or six percent. The reason is if we use much more fragrance than about point five percent, you will have basically a perfume or a cologne on your hands, right and that's not what we want. What we want is something that gives a nice, light scent but not something that makes people cough and choke when you walk into a room or something that overpowers just you when you're wearing your own lotion that you make.

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