by Marie | Dec 5, 2022 | Body Butter, Christmas Spice
Body butter bars—also called lotion bars—are a great beginner-friendly DIY. Today I’m going to share a chocolate-y body butter bar formulation that employs two of my top strategies for making expensive-feeling body butter bars that will impress your friends and make fabulous gifts. Let’s dive in!

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by Marie | Nov 28, 2022 | Christmas Spice, Hand & Body Washes
Today’s formulation sets out to dupe the rich, luxurious lather and decadent, lingering scent of the very popular Bath & Body Works foaming hand soaps, but using ingredients we can get relatively easy. I had a ton of fun with this formulation, and documented the entire process in the partner video—I highly recommend watching it to learn more about the development process. Let’s get lathery!

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by Marie | Nov 14, 2022 | Christmas Spice, Scrubs
If you’ve been looking for a soft, scoopy, foaming sugar scrub that won’t get too hard or melt into an oily mess… I’ve got good news for you 😄 This Christmas Spice Soft Foaming Sugar Scrub has a really fun, cake-batter-like gooey consistency. It’s perfectly scoopable, lathers beautifully, and smells fantastic. It’s easy and inexpensive to make (you can fill a 250mL jar for about $4), and you can easily customize it. Let’s get scrubby!

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by Marie | Nov 7, 2022 | Body Butter, Hot Chocolate
Today we’re kicking off our holiday 2022 making with a silky, decadent Hot Chocolate Natural Body Butter 🍫 This formulation is part of our first theme—Hot Chocolate! This is a bit of a “Bee Better” of a theme I very briefly touched on back in 2013. It was just a soap, and I wanted to do the theme justice with a few more decadent formulations 😋

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by Marie | Oct 10, 2022 | Articles, Essential Reading, Lotion
If you dream of fluid body milks, ultra-light emulsions, and fast-absorbing lotions, this post is for you. Today I’ll be teaching you how to make thinner, lighter emulsions—I’m sharing three different strategies that you can mix and match to create the fast-absorbing emulsion of your dreams 😍

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by Marie | Oct 3, 2022 | Articles, Essential Reading, Lotion
I struggled with what to title this post. I will be teaching you how to make your lotions richer and thicker, but the formulation skill behind that richness & thickness boosting is so much more than that! I will go as far as to say if you don’t know how to do this, you don’t know how to formulate emulsions. This skill is that important—really. This formulation decision is what will form the chassis of your lotion formulations: everything else will grow from there. What is that super important skill, you ask? Determining (or changing) the size of the oil phase. I know it doesn’t sound exciting, but I promise it is! Once you know how to do this you will have so much more control over your lotion formulations. You’ll start to know how rich or light a formulation will be from just looking at it, and you’ll know how to structure your own formulations based on how fast-absorbing or heavy you want the finished product to be. This skill is so essential to lotion formulation that you’ll wonder how you ever emulsified without it. Let’s dive in!

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