Homemade Lotion Bars

My supplies I ordered from Wholesale Supplies Plus came last night!  I was super excited, which usually means I annoyed the crap out of everyone around me by talking incessantly about how excited I was.  That meant I finally had containers and cocoa butter and essential oils.

On a "not related to the lotion bar recipe" note, I was so glad I found Wholesale Supplies Plus.  Pretty much every blog and video tutorial I read and saw with recipes for making cosmetics said they ordered theirs from Mountain Rose Herbs, which was actually the first site I found when looking for lip balm tubes, so one would think they have the best prices overall, but they don't!  Wholesale Supplies Plus was cheaper on every item (much cheaper on some) and they have free shipping ($30 minimum order.  If your order is less than $30 you still get charged $30 total).  In fact, they seem to have a larger selection.  Their customer service also rocks (sadly, in a week I've managed to send them 4 inquiry emails and they answered them all within 4 hours.  I ask a lot of questions).  Another feature that endeared them to me was that upon checkout they asked if they could round my order up to the nearest dollar and donate that spare change to the Life Center for Autism.  I have a brother who is low functioning autistic, so this touched me in a personal way.  I'll definitely be ordering from them again.

And now for your regularly scheduled recipe.  If you don't know what a lotion bar is, don't feel sad.  I'd never heard of them until about a week ago, but they sound awesome so I figured I would give them a try.  Apparently they are concentrated lotion that looks like soap and is applied like soap (only on dry skin instead of wet).  They are supposed to be uber moisturizing.  All the posts I found about them talked about using them in the winter for extremely dry skin or for eczema, so here's hoping these aren't kidding around with the moisture!

The ingredients I used:
3.2oz beeswax
1.4oz olive oil (or 0.7oz olive oil and 0.7oz another oil, like jojoba.  I just used olive.)
5oz cocoa butter (you can split this between two or three different butters if you like.  The recipe I based the amounts off actually had 1/3 cocoa butter, 1/3 shea butter and 1/3 mango butter, but I only had cocoa butter in my apartment.)  I bought unrefined cocoa powder which literally smells like a chocolate bar.  I wanted to just bite in!
1tsp vitamin E oil

Short, simple and sweet, right?

Step 1: I combined the beeswax, olive oil and cocoa butter in a glass measuring cup.  This was accomplished by putting the measuring cup on my kitchen scale, setting it to tare to 0, then adding one ingredient to the right weight, setting it to tare again, then adding the second ingredient to the right weight, taring it one last time and then adding the third ingredient.  I put a pot on the stove with about two inches of water and set the heat to medium.  I then put the glass cup in the water and waited for everything to melt.  For those not in the "know", this is what's commonly referred to as a double boiler, if you've seen that in recipes and been confused.  Traditionally it's a smaller put in a larger pot, but I didn't see a need for that.  Using the glass measuring cup was much easier for me as I could pour it directly out of the cup into the molds later.

Here are the ingredients in my glass measuring cup in a pot of water.  I realized after I had it in there how ridiculously small my pot was.  Mental note to use a bigger pot next time.  This one worked, but it kept making loud popping sounds cause the water had no room for movement and when I went to remove the cup it splashed hot water on my hands.  It was only set at medium, so it didn't burn, but it wasn't fun!

Step 2: after these ingredients have melted fully, take the measuring cup out of the double boiler and put it on a trivet or a surface that can hold hot items safely.  Then I added the 1tsp vitamin E oil.  I really have been wanting some unscented lotions (the fake scents in everything are starting to drive me crazy), so I didn't add any essential oils, but if you wanted to have scented lotion, this would be the time for you to add them.

Step 3:  I poured the lotion into a mold.  I had gotten some "lotion bars" that look exactly like deodorant sticks from Wholesale Supplies Plus, but opted not to use them this time because I got the cute idea off the web of putting them in papers in a muffin tin.  My recipe filled up five muffin spots.

I meant to take this photo right after pouring, but forgot for about ten minutes so they area already starting to cool in this photo.

Step 4: let them cool.  I let mine cool for about an hour on the counter and then, when I could remove the muffin cups from the tin, put them in the fridge for about a half hour.  Here's what the finished product looked like:

I'm not sure why there are still some visible flakes of beeswax in there.  Perhaps I didn't stir well/long enough to fully mix the ingredients together?

I tried using one and it certainly moisturizes well.  The oil makes your skin slick, but it doesn't quite feel greasy to me.  What I didn't like was that the bar felt like it was melting in my hand while I was using it.  I'm not sure if it just needs to cool overnight before I use it in the future or if it's just that soft.  While applying it by hand, that was when I wished I'd have used the lotion bars.  I imagine those would be MUCH easy for applying this type of lotion.  But this is cute and small and solid, so I am hoping I can wrap them up in some fabric with a bow and include them as part of my holiday gifts for people.

Not only was this recipe super easy, it was super quick!  I put rice in my rice cooker, started to put the materials together, then went and spent ten minutes on the web making sure I understood the ratios I needed, came back, made the bars and had them cooling a good five minutes before my rice was ready to eat.

If you try this recipe out, let me know what you think?  If you had substitutions that worked or just know of some other great lotion bar recipes, please share with the class!

The Road So Far...

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.  All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make the better."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Putting aside the fact that leading off with a quote invokes flashbacks to Lincoln-Douglas debates with the high school debate team, my pal Ralphy clearly understood where I was going to be in my life when he wrote this in his journal in November of 1842.  No, I do not have Ralph Waldo Emerson's journals memorized.  That's why we have Google.

While undoubtedly I could trace this journey back to my first breath if I wanted to, I think a better starting point for my story would only go back a few months, when I made a conscious decision to change something in my life I was not happy about.  That change was a rather ordinary one in this day and age: I decided I needed to lose weight.  I am, unfortunately, an apple shape.  This is a body type much more common on men than on women.  For men, we tend to refer to their added weight as a beer belly.  Women don't generally have beer bellies, a mound of weight over their stomach usually is an indicator of other things.   As my added weight tended to bypass my legs and arms and even my tush on its way to settle over my abdomen, I started getting congratulated about once a week on my "pregnancy".  Word to the wise, oh readers, please promise me that you will NEVER assume someone is pregnant, not even a friend but ESPECIALLY not a complete stranger?  If someone has not specifically told you they are pregnant and you do not see a child coming out of their body, you stand the very real risk of simply making someone feel horrible about themselves and embarrassing yourself.  I would tell people it was OK and not to worry about it, but it really wasn't.  The only time I remember not being overly upset by it was when a clearly drunk guy at the Renaissance faire made a comment on my "air pocket" and then, once I figured out "air pocket" was his code word for "baby," he kept insisting that I was lying about not being pregnant.  That one I actually walked away more amused then upset  As a second word to the wise, even if someone has told you they ARE pregnant, please do not refer to their unborn child as an "air pocket".  I'm not sure it's as amusing if you actually are pregnant.

Finally I received one more pregnancy comment than I could handle (actually, it was two by a hostess at a restaurant.  She kept commenting on it as she took us to our table and I tried to explain to her I was not pregnant, but she clearly wasn't listening as she congratulated me AGAIN on our way out the door.) and I snapped.  It was depressing, my self esteem was at an all time low.  It was at this time that a good friend of mine asked me to go back to using a food diary website, MyFitnessPal, which I had tried a year before and had no luck with.  She told me that she and her two sisters were going to use it and they wanted to do it as a group.  My arm didn't need that much twisting at that point, so I went and brushed off my account.  This time I decided to get serious about losing the weight and keeping it off.  The last time I tried this site, I had basically continued to eat the same stuff but in smaller quantities which left me hungry ALL the time.  This time I figured if I eat healthier, more filling foods then maybe I wouldn't be so hungry all the time. 

I went into research mode.  I am a chronic over-researcher.  From big fancy electronics down to what water bottle to buy, I will spend hours online making sure I have all the information before a purchase.  But, surprisingly, I'd never done this with my food.  The more I researched how to read a label and the ingredients list, the more I realized I had very little idea about what was going into my body and, frankly, it scared me.  Half the items in any given ingredient list I couldn't pronounce and hadn't the foggiest clue what it was or where it came from, but it usually sounded like it had been produced in a lab.  While I did not get freaked out quite enough to switch to a paleo diet, I did start making a concerted effort to eat more raw fruits and vegetables and to buy things with simple, understandable ingredient lists.

From here I started wondering if I really needed to be buying so many pre-made items at the grocery store.  I felt better if I could make it myself and know EXACTLY what was in it (yes, that probably indicates I have control issues).  I started small, with things like making my own instant oatmeal instead of buying the Quaker pouches.  At the same time I started researching what healthy things I could substitute for unhealthy things in recipes.  There are still many many every day things I eat that I need to research home-made alternatives to and I hope to post those recipes as I find them.

From paying attention to what goes IN my body, I recently made the jump to paying attention to what goes ON my body.  Though, to be honest, that jump was just as fueled by economic considerations.  The first inspiration came when I visited family and a good friend for Columbus day and she saw how chapped my lips were and insisted I use some of her Mary Kay lip exfoliator.  It worked impressively well and I wanted some, but it was way too much money for that tiny bottle.  I looked at Walmart for a cheaper version but they didn't have any lip exfoliators, so I turned to Google to see where I could buy a cheaper version.  What I found were a bunch of recipes online for making this item out of things I currently had in my kitchen (1tsp olive oil, 1stp honey and 1tsp brown sugar).  I tried it and it worked amazingly well.  Since then I have changed how I look at the things I use every day, just as I'd changed how I looked at the things I eat every day. 

This new outlook has inspired me to continually look for new ways to live cleaner, healthier and (hopefully as an added bonus) cheaper, both inside and out.  I'm hoping you'll share that journey with me, even if only vicariously though my stories and pictures.