These silky, lightweight body butter bars are a wonderful accompaniment to our Sugar Plum series—and they’re quite versatile, too! You can present them in a tube or choose a mould you find suitable; you can make a few big ones or a bunch of wee ones. I’ve got a couple...
read moreDIY Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas: 2018 Edition
Welcome to the 2018 Humblebee & Me Holiday Gift Guide! I’ve had a lot of fun playing with the year’s themes—Sugar Plum & Christmas Tree—combining some fun visuals and ingredients with the new things I’ve learned over the last year. Throughout these projects you’ll find techniques I learned from Formula Botanica, new ingredients Windy Point started carrying (and ones I brought home from trips abroad!), and so many things I’m proud of.
I hope you can find some wonderfully gift-able things in this assortment of projects. I know I’ll be gifting some of these things to my loved ones this season!
Sugar Plum Projects
Sugar Plum Body Butter Bars
Sugar Plum Facial Lotion
I start planning out Christmas recipes in the summer and typically have everything more-or-less nailed down by the end of September. This formula wasn't in the original plan, but I am so in love with plum oil right now that I couldn't not make some sort of decadent...
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Sugar Plum Cleansing Conditioner
This Sugar Plum Cleansing Conditioner is a wonderful continuation to the fun I've been having making cleansing conditioners over the last few months. My aim with this one was to create something lighter that could work better for anyone with hair that can be easily...
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Sugar Plum Lip Balm
I've been gifting homemade lip balm to friends and family for so long now that people have told me they just hold out for Christmas rather than buy more—and I'm definitely not going to let them down! This year's holiday lip balm is Sugar Plum themed (it seemed much...
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Sugar Plum Conditioning Body Butter
I'm having a hard time deciding if I can give this Sugar Plum Conditioning Body Butter away. I mean... it's just so nice. I really want to keep it for myself. I really should give it away. I am a one-woman skin care stuff factory and I am not due to need another body...
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Sugar Plum Body Oil
This is our second Sugar Plum recipe for holidays 2018 making, and it makes for a delightful gift (or, you know... keep it for yourself!). It's easy to make, can be dressed up with a pretty bottle, and feels really quite expensive and posh. The recipe is easy to...
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Sugar Plum Christmas Soap
Welcome to our first Christmas 2018 soap—Sugar Plum Christmas Soap! Sugar plum will be one of our ongoing themes this season, and I'm really excited about all the different projects I've devised for it. We're kicking off the theme with these stunning purple, swirly,...
read moreChristmas Tree Projects
Christmas Tree Body Wash
This fragrant, bubbly body wash has quickly become an in-shower favourite for me. I love the consistency, I love the bubbles, and I love the crystal clarity of it if you choose a water soluble colourant. I’m calling it a body wash here, but it also makes a great hand...
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Christmas Tree Hand & Body Lotion
This sweetly scented Christmas Tree Hand & Body Lotion is just the thing for dry winter skin. It has a wonderful rich consistency, but is surprisingly light. It's packed with humectants and soothing ingredients to help tame dry, itchy skin, leaving it soft and...
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Christmas Tree Bath Bombs
Today we're making some fun, colourful Christmas Tree Bath Bombs! I took some decoration inspiration from the top of the Christmas Tree Soap bars pre-swirling, and had a lot of fun playing with mica splatters and scatters after molding up all the bath bombs. The base...
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Christmas Tree Foaming Whipped Body Scrub
Today's DIY is a super-fun Christmas Tree Foaming Whipped Body Scrub. It's a creamy white base speckled with green and gold VitaBurst beads. It smells like a Christmas tree and is a super fun way to pamper yourself (and your giftees!) come bath time. You can customize...
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Christmas Tree Foaming Hand Wash
If you've got guests coming to stay with you this holiday season I highly recommend whipping up a jumbo-sized batch of this hand wash so you can all have clean, holiday-scented hands in the midst of this busy season. Out of everything we're making for this holiday...
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Christmas Tree Soap
Welcome to our second and final soap of the 2018 holiday soaping season—Christmas Tree Soap! These clean white bars feature an abstract Christmas-tree-inspired swirl down the centre and a topping of dancing mica swirls. I had so much fun creating these bars, and the...
read moreOther Awesome Gift Worthy Projects
Rose Witch Hazel Facial Toner
This sweetly fragrant, refreshing facial toner has become a fast favourite of mine. It smells deliciously of roses, features several soothing and lightly hydrating ingredients, and leaves my skin feeling revived and gently cleansed. It's also crazy easy to make (no...
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Oil Cleansing Gel
When I was in Montreal last year I visited Coop Coco, a local DIY supplier, and poked around, looking for things I didn’t have that would fit in my suitcase. I ended up picking up a bottle of Sucragel, a cold-process emulsifier I’d never worked with before, brought it...
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Creamy Stick Lip Tints
When it comes to makeup I actually wear on a regular basis I find I tend towards subtle, easy-to-apply stuff (read: stuff that goes on easily and lightly enough that it disguises my amateurish makeup application skills). These lip tints were born of my initial...
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Rose Cardamom Cleansing Conditioner
After making and testing my Cream of Earl Grey Cleansing Conditioner I fell in love with the concept and the product. I found it left my hair incredibly soft and manageable, and I loved the single step in the shower. Working palmfuls of creamy conditioner through my...
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Foaming Shaving Cream
One of my clearest memories from early adolescence was the discovery of shaving cream, and how utterly wonderful it was. A thin stream of colourful gel would transform into abundant, creamy lather for an utterly decadent shaving experience that usually smelled like...
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Coconut Massage Butter
Massage lovers everywhere: prepare to fall in love. This silky, glide-y Coconut Massage Butter gives you eons of working time on the skin for a luxurious, satiny massage. It isn't oily or greasy, but you'll find your hands gliding over skin with a wonderful, soft...
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Whipped Shea Citrus Body Butter
This marvelous body butter is many things I thought it couldn’t be. It is rich in skin-loving shea butter, but not at all greasy. It smells deliciously of citrus, but isn’t photosensitizing. It is lightweight and whippy (and stays that way!), but you don’t have to do...
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Conditioning Super Nourishing Hair Balm
One of the first recipes I ever shared on Humblebee & Me was for a "Super Nourishing Hair Balm", all the way back in October of 2011. I'd actually made the balm months earlier, before I'd launched the blog, and had been testing it all summer and fall before I...
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Lemon Rose Facial Lotion
This lightweight, hydration-packed facial lotion is one of my formulas from my Formula Botanica coursework, and it also happens to be the first recipe I'm sharing using hyaluronic acid! I tested this lotion through some of Calgary's driest winter months and found it...
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Rose Micellar Water
I'm pretty excited to be able to share a micellar water recipe I'm happy with. I've been experimenting with micellar water formulas quite a lot over the last year and while the concept is simple enough in theory, it took quite a lot of fiddling and refining to create...
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Sleepy Time Lavender Benzoin Lotion
This soft, sweet Sleepy Time Lavender Benzoin Lotion has become a fast favourite of mine. I look forward to smoothing it down my arms and legs before tucking into bed and drifting off with sweet vanilla-frosted lavender floating around me. I also find the oats in the...
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Super Concentrated Lemon Dishwashing Paste
If you’ve been using liquid dishwashing detergent, prepare to have your world rocked. Seriously. Solid dishwashing paste kicks dishwashing butt in ways you didn’t think could happen. It’s so amazing that I was actually excited about washing dishes as I was developing...
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Silky Volumizing Conditioning Shampoo
I am so excited to share this recipe with you guys. I've been working on it since shortly after new years, and sharing the progress on my Instagram stories as I've been testing and tweaking. This is a conditioning shampoo; more lather than a cleansing conditioner, but...
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Ginger Oak Moss Solid Facial Cleanser
This Ginger Oak Moss Solid Facial Cleanser is the sister to my Ginger Oak Moss Cleansing Balm Stick; the two accompanied me all around New Zealand last December, and did brilliantly. The inspiration for this came from a product I stumbled across while perusing...
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Conditioning Earl Grey Body Butter
This Conditioning Earl Grey Body Butter ended up being one of those things that sounded like a good idea, and then turned out to be a great idea in practice. Don't you love it when that happens? In abstract, adding some conditioning, cationic goodness to a body butter...
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Snowy Dawn Cream Luminizer
Over Christmas we had a positively frigid cold snap here in Calgary; waking up to temperatures below -40°C with windchill was not uncommon, and most days had "highs" no higher than -25°C. This lasted for about ten days, and while my preference would've been to sleep...
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Ginger Oak Moss Cleansing Balm Stick
I love this fragrant, creamy stick of cleansing goodness. I took the first version with my to New Zealand, where I spent much of my time on the road, camping somewhere new each night, and this stick was brilliant. I was so happy to have something I could use quickly...
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