How to Make Lotion: Beginner's Recipe
Lesson 14 from: Make Your Own Bath & Body ProductsAnne-Marie Faiola
How to Make Lotion: Beginner's Recipe
Lesson 14 from: Make Your Own Bath & Body ProductsAnne-Marie Faiola
Lessons
Class Introduction
00:57 2The Science of Soap Making
08:40 3Important Soaping Vocabulary
09:52 4How to Use Oils, Colorants, Additives & Molds
32:02 5Tools Needed to Make Soap
05:28 6How to Use Lye Safely
05:30 7Lavender Everything Cold Process Soap Recipe
29:45 8Ingredients to Make Lotion
05:23Emulsifiers & Co-Emulsifiers for Lotion
03:34 10Preservatives for Lotion
05:35 11Liquids for Lotion
03:17 12Color & Additives for Lotion
08:48 13How to Sanitize Before Making Lotion
02:35 14How to Make Lotion: Beginner's Recipe
09:46 15Label Lotion to Sell
04:34 16How to Make a Balm: Whipped Avocado Balm
15:34 17Why Use Scrubs?
03:26 18Different Kinds of Exfoliants
05:20 19Preservatives in Scrubs?
07:08 20How to Make Pink Sea Salt Body Scrub
05:25 21How to Make Walnut Facial Scrub
12:37 22How to Make an Emulsified Scrub
16:04 23Label to Sell Scrubs
14:16 24Handmade Beauty Box: Shaving Soap
21:32 25Handmade Beauty Box: Jojoba Bead Scrub
18:09Lesson Info
How to Make Lotion: Beginner's Recipe
Let's get started making lotion. Are you super excited? This is awesome. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to heat our sweet almond oil and this is all done by weight you guys not volume. So the recipe's right up here for you on the screen. This is 1.7 ounces of sweet almond oil. And then we have one ounce of avocado oil, and we melt all of our butters and our waxes together but not, wait, we melt all of our waxes and oils together but not our butters and we're gonna talk about that in just a minute. 1.2 ounces of emulsifying wax and one ounce of stearic acid and stearic acid is nice, light, and fluffy. And emulsifying wax comes in castile so I'm going to go over to the microwave and just heat this right now for two minutes. There we go and while that's heating, let's talk about butters. So butters, mango butter, avocado butter, Shea butter, those are like my favorite ones to use. There's cocoa butter, there's other butters that you can use but those are kind of...
my four that I work with. Now you guys know what happens if you heat up regular butter that you eat in the microwave, right? It gets liquid but then it never really hardens up again properly, like it's kind of just melted, wilty, and sad. That's exactly what happens with these butters, the chemical bonds get broken when you melt them fast and on high heat, when they get melted fast and on high heat, the little chemical bonds break and then they don't ever reorient back together. If that happens to you, it's not the end of the world. But you get little teeny, teeny grains of like Shea butter or mango butter or cocoa butter in your lip balms or your lotions or your lotion bars and that's not a big deal but one of the ways that we can get away from that is by melting our butters gently and slowly in our melted waxes and oils. Another thing I want to talk about really quickly while those are melting is, did you notice how small of a container I was using? I was melting my waxes and my oils in a small container. You would never, ever, ever just want put like a couple ounces of something in this container to melt. When the microwave works, it will super heat all the air inside the container as well and the transition from inside the microwave to outside will be so hot and jarring on your glass container, you can break your glass container if there's too much empty head space. I have personally done this before in front of a live class 'cause you know there was not the right size container and I was like oh whatever I'm just gonna do it. Don't do it, so make sure that you never have more than about 50% to 75% of your oils and waxes. You don't want that much head space. So you see this is just half a head space here, like not very much. I'm gonna put this right here and I'm just gonna add my distilled water so I've already measured out my distilled water and I'm gonna just heat this up for one minute in the microwave while we work on our butter and the reason I'm heating this up in the microwave is because it's cold. What happens when you add cold water to hot oils and waxes? They congeal really, really, really quickly. So that's why I'm adding that to, here we go, spoon. So now gently, gently add your Shea butter to your melted waxes and oils and I find that when I start with my liquid oils and my waxes together, the whole thing melts down easier so you're like why are you heating up liquid oils, those are already liquid like you don't have to heat them up. I just find it helps the entire thing to melt down more smoothly and evenly and again, you don't wanna be introducing room temperature products to hot products because then they quickly cool down the waxes that are in there. My Shea butter has been fully melted in in a gently loving fashion so hopefully its bonds and its chemical structure can stay nice together. So we have 1.2 ounces of Shea butter in here. The 18 ounces of distilled water is in the microwave, I'm gonna go grab that, and then we're going to use a stick blender to blend everything together. Like in soap making, stick blenders are really, really, really helpful because they make everything, there's my geranium essential oil and this is my Optiphen, my broad spectrum preservative, move that out of the way. Set this little guy here and all my products have been sanitized including my stick blender so I'm gonna take my temperature. We are at 113 and we're at 188. The preservative works at 176 degrees and below. Meaning if I add the preservative and my entire mixture is too hot, it burns off the preservative and it ruins the preservative. However, since I know that my water is at and this is at 186, I can do the math. 110 degree water mixed with 186 degree oils and waxes, that's gonna bring down the temperature so we're good. So now, this is so cool you guys, it happens so fast, the emulsification happens so fast. So you ready? Okay, here we go. You can see it turning white as it starts to emulsify. And you're like well could I just let it sit here. What would happen? It would cool down unevenly and you would end up with kind of chunky lotion, it wouldn't be ideal so we do wanna give this a good stick blend. So, taking my stick blender and burping it 'cause I don't like a lot of air bubbles. Just give this a good blend to make sure it's fully mixed together and just a word about hair nets and gloves. If you're watching this and you're like I am so doing this in big batches, I can do the math. 70% water, there is a lot of like, there's a lot of money to be had here if I sold lotion, you need to be thinking clean kitchen environment, good manufacturing practices and you definitely need to be wearing a hair net and wearing gloves and working in a clean kitchen environment. We're at 112 so I could add my Optiphen and I can add my geranium essential oil. Ooh, I heard that. I heard the air bubbles going in. The air bubbles are fine, it's just that they take longer, they have to come to the surface at some point so I like to not whip in air bubbles. So give a quick stick blend. And then all you need to do is put this in containers and allow it to cool off. You do not want to cap your containers quite yet because if you cap the containers as these are cooling off, condensation is forming on the top here. We don't want to give our preservative any extra work to not have bacterial growth, condensation, water sitting on the top of the lotion is extra work for the preservative so we don't cap them. So all you do is just fill your bottles and there are, when you're thinking big, big, mechanized productions, there are absolutely ways that you can make this much faster and get bottle fillers for as little as $500 to $1,000. So when you're thinking how am I gonna fill these by hand for 700 bottles 'cause I'm going big with my business, there are bottle fillers. So I'm just gonna fill this next one and then I'm gonna move on to bombs but while I'm doing it, Kenna, do we have any questions? Yes, we do. Let's see. I had a question about whether you can use, is that earlier in the class we were making soap, is that the same hand mixer that you're using? It's the same hand mixer, yeah. So can I use my soap hand mixer versus my stick blender for this, absolutely just don't use it for food. I just worry about bleh, just worry about that. Also, if you're making it for sale, trust me, the FDA not gonna be happy if you're cross mixing and I know I said that was my last one. I just can't leave lotion to not be in the bottles. So from Beth Engelheart, how do you know when your oils in a lotion have gone rancid, do they all smell bad, when they go? They smell. Yeah, that's a great question Beth. How do you know when your oils have gone rancid? They smell horrible, they smell like rotten socks. They really do, okay, I'm gonna stop. I'm stopping, I'm not gonna pour all this. I want to but it's hard not to. I'm also going to cap these 'cause can you imagine how much mess this would be if these open ones actually fell while I was like, bumped the table. Be a disaster so yeah, rancid oils smell terrible. They smell like, like the only thing I can think of is like rotten gym socks from like a 16 year old boys basketball team that have been sitting in a corner under the bed for like eight months, like just it is a bad smell. It's not gonna hurt you, it just smells terrible.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Alexandra Paniagua
As a "Seasoned" Soaper this workshop was very instructive, fast paced and not boring at all!!!!! As everything else, we have to be up to date with new trends and ingredients, every day is a learning process, thank you very much to Creative Live, Anne-Marie and Bramble Berry for this AWESOME work shop and I hope you have another one soon :) :)
Julz P
Love this class! Second time watching it, wish there were live classes at this level in my City, I would love to make stuff on the weekends :-) Great job - love the class, come back soon!
a Creativelive Student
Anne-Marie was a very thorough and thoughtful instructor. Her knowledge and enthusiasm were inspiring. She had everything organized and presented it in a very comprehensive sequential order. GREAT class as I never knew anything about soap/lotions/scrubs/balms/etc. I'd recommend purchasing the class!
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