One of my favourite things about Humblebee & Me is hosting meet-ups; I usually have them when I travel, but I’ve also had a few here in Calgary, where I live. Renée came to my most recent one and we ended up chatting about foaming hand washes quite a lot—her kids love them, and she loves how it’s a lot harder for them to make a mess with a foaming hand wash! I feel like I gushed far too much about how easy foaming hand washes are to make, and how much fun you can have with them. Anyhow, that conversation got me thinking about foaming hand washes, so I decided to whip up a simple one with a bright, sweet essential oil blend. There’s no heating or solid surfactant melting required, so it comes together really quickly—perfect for busy moms! This Aloe Rosemary Spruce Foaming Hand Wash is for you, Renée!
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The surfactant blend is Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside and Cocamidopropyl Betaine—a non ionic + amphoteric blend. Both are gentle surfactants, and once combined they are even moreso. The recipe is 25% surfactants, but once we take into account the active matter of the surfactants (60% and 30%, respectively) we find we’ve got 10.5% active surfactant matter, which is fairly low.
Aloe vera juice and distilled water make up the bulk of the wash—I included some aloe vera for its skin-soothing goodness, but you certainly don’t have to include it (more water will work perfectly fine in its place). Some vegetable glycerine helps keep the wash from being too drying.
Our essential oil blend is a nice medley of sweet, herbal, and bright notes. Rosemary is assertively, refreshingly herbal. Spruce is bright and clean, and palmarosa is warm and sweet. I really like how they come together to create something that dances lightly at first whiff, and then settles down into something soft and warm. I used black spruce (Picea mariana) and Spanish rosemary (Rosmarinus Officinalis), but if your spruce is white or your rosemary hails from a different country feel free to use those instead; you aren’t likely to notice much of a difference.
I used two different beakers and two different scales to pull this together, weighing the ingredients used in larger amounts into a larger beaker on a less accurate, but more weight tolerant scale. The ingredients used in smaller amounts were weighed into a smaller beaker on a more precise, but lower weight limit scale. Once the weighing was done all that remained was some combining! I used my MicroMini™ Mixer from Lotion Crafter (which is a Badger Airbrush Co. paint mixer, for anyone outside the USA), taking care to keep the whizzy head well below the surface to avoid whipping up a bunch of lather. A milk frother would be a decent alternative, but they are obviously designed to froth, which isn’t really what we want, so be careful.
Et voila! Seriously. Measure, mix, done. You will need a foamer bottle—you’ll notice the end product has a viscosity comparable to water, which makes it very well suited to a foamer bottle and very not suited to any other sort of packaging. The foamer bottle pump is what does the magic of transforming this thin, unassuming liquid into cascades of delicious, silky foam! And, just a reminder—no matter how tempted you may be, please don’t re-use foamer bottle tops. They are so intricate that they’re impossible to properly clean and you’ll end up with a foamer bottle with all kinds of gross things camping in it, contaminating your next batch. Erk!
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Aloe Rosemary Spruce Foaming Hand Wash
10g | 10% Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside (USA / Canada)
15g | 15%Â Cocamidopropyl Betaine (USA / Canada)
40g | 40%Â aloe vera juice
5g | 5%Â vegetable glycerine (USA / Canada)
29g | 29% distilled water0.2g | 0.2%Â rosemary essential oil
0.2g | 0.2%Â spruce essential oil
0.1g | 0.1%Â palmarosa essential oil
0.5g | 0.5% Liquid Germall Plusâ„¢ (USA / Canada)Weigh the surfactants, aloe juice, glycerine, and distilled water into a small heat-resistant glass measuring cup or beaker. I used a scale accurate to 0.1g with a maximum weight of 2kg for this part. Using a small mixer, blend to combine, taking care to keep the mixing head below the surface of the mixture so you don’t work up a bunch of lather.
Weigh the essential oils and preservative into a small dish or beaker. You’ll want to use a more accurate scale for this part (I used one accurate to 0.01g), and scales that accurate tend to have a lower maximum weight (mine tops out at 200g, many top out at 100g). Because of this limitation you need to make sure your container isn’t so heavy that it’ll max out your scale. I used a wee 50mL beaker.
Once you’ve got both parts, pour some of the water/surfactant blend into the essential oil mixture and blend to combine before pouring that mixture back into the rest of the water/surfactant mixture. Blend again to combine and you’re done! Decant the mixture into a foamer bottle—both YellowBee and Windy Point have some really nice ones!
As I made it, the pH of this hand wash is ~5.5, which is right where we want it. I’d recommend checking the pH of your cleanser and adjusting it if necessary before bottling, especially if you make any substitutions.
Shelf Life & Storage
Because this hand wash contains water, you must include a broad-spectrum preservative to ward off microbial growth. This is non-optional. Even with a preservative this project is likely to eventually spoil as our kitchens are not sterile laboratories, so in the event you notice any change in colour, scent, or texture, chuck it out and make a fresh batch.
Substitutions
As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the recipe, you will get a different final product than I did.
- As I’ve provided this recipe in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams this recipe will make 100g; you’ll likely want to scale it up to fill whatever size of foamer bottle you have.
- You can coco glucoside in place of Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside, however please ensure you test the pH and adjust as required as the pH of coco glucoside is much higher than that of Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside. I’d also recommend adding ~2% polysorbate 20 (removing that amount from the distilled water) to ensure the essential oils solubilize as I’ve found coco glucoside is not as effective of a solubilizer as Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside.
- You can make your own aloe juice from aloe vera 200x concentrate powder by combining 0.5g aloe vera 200x concentrate powder, 0.5g liquid germall plus, and 99g distilled water
- You can replace the aloe juice with more water
- You can use a different essential oil or scent blend, but I’d recommend keeping the total amount around 0.5%
Ooh lovely, something that doesn’t need melting and smooshing together for ages 🙂 COuld I sub Sodium C14/C16 Olefin Sulphonate for the Caprylyl/Capryl Glucosthe? I don’t know how gentle (or not) this is, I believe it is 39% active? Thanks Marie you are the highlight of my monday morning (and thursday lol) 🙂
That was supposed to be
Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside my phone decided that was wrong 😀
Silly phone… I wish we could install a DIY dictionary as an additional language LOL.
You can, however it’s anionic rather that non-ionic, and has a much lower ASM % (39% vs 60%). In my experience it’s a pretty good solubilizer so I think it should still solubilize the essential oils, but even so you may want to adjust the amount (decreasing the water correspondingly) to get a closer total active surfactant matter 🙂
Thank you for your help and sharing your knowledge Marie. I am still trying to get my head around ASM, then there’s anionic, non ionic, amphoteric etc, my head is beginning to spin : -) I Will have a play, thank you.
Definitely check out the surfactant/detergent guide from It’s All In My Hands—it’s been SO helpful!
Thank you Marie, I will sit and have a read of that and make some notes (my memory is terrible, I put it down to having so many hobbies it doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be doing lol) I will make the time over the weekend 🙂 thanks for the link.
It’s really well written and breaks it down brilliantly—I bet more will stick than you anticipate. It all just “clicked” for me and set up shop in my brain haha 😛
I make a foaming hand soap with Castille soap, water, a bit of fractionated coconut oil and essential oils. It is very little work, and it is something I have on hand all the time.
I appreciate knowing about the dangers if reusing the top of the bottle – never would have thought of lurking bacteria in there?
Love all your hints and recipes.
These pump top bottles are probably some of the worst things to try and re-use—they are so intricate that they just turn into networks of mould if you try to clean them. Also, I think you will need a preservative for your concoction—I suspect the soap is used at too low of a rate to offer any preservation to the entire batch 🙂 Happy making!
Hi Marie, I have been checking out a lot of your recipes lately and I’m really intrigued. My interest is particularly in hair products. I’m of African decent hence I have very coily Afro hair. After watching this hand wash recipe, I’m curious to try make a shampoo with similar properties and ingredients but substitute the cocamidopropyl betaine for soap nut liquid extract. The reason I want to make a foam shampoo (we could call it a mousse) is to cater for the days that my hair will be in protective styles (braids of twists). They tend to unravel with frequent washes, but I’m thinking the mousse would be mildly manipulative yet cleansing, hence I can keep the protective style in much longer…. what are your thoughts in this?
Hey! I wouldn’t use soap nut extract as a swap for cocoamidopropyl betaine—they are CRAZY different. One is an amphoteric surfactant, the other is a plant extract that contains some saponins. They are SO, SO different and cannot be substituted for one another.
I’m not sure you would find applying something like this as a leave in product to have either hold or cleansing power—it would be sticky if not rinsed out, and would attract dust, likely making the hair dirtier.
Thanks for your response. I’ll do away with the soap nut extract. Is it possible to have a mousse shampoo? One made with the proper surfactants of a moisturizing shampoo but with the consistency of a foamy hand wash?
I can’t see why it wouldn’t be possible, but you will need to stick to mostly liquid surfactants; I’m currently playing with a moussey surfactant blend that obviously has too much SCI and it settles out and doesn’t so much foam as sputter 😛
Hi Marie. I’m looking for a gentle, foaming facial cleanser. Will the surfactants from this recipe work or would Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI) work better along with the Amphosol CG? You’re amazingly creative! I’m always looking forward to your updates:)
I actually developed this recipe as a foaming facial cleanser initially—it might be a better place to start!
Hi Marie!
This might sound childish but I just want to dive straight into try making your recipes but I don’t know anything about adjusting ph level or checking ph level,so can you please guide me? And what if I want to make and sell these recipes?
Hey! You can learn more about pH and adjusting here.
Regarding selling, please read this and this 🙂
I am very happy that this recipe worked for me. I also tried the solid shampoo with mint for hair and it is also very good. And the hair conditioner is excellent. I also have a skin cream on my to-do list and I have no doubts that it won’t turn out well
I love you and wish you much success and many ideas in the future.