Today we’re creating something simple—an aromatic, creamy salve with an intoxicating essential oil blend designed to ground and calm. It’s a great DIY for beginners, with a relatively short ingredient list of simple, plant-based ingredients. I’m loving both applying this salve to my hands and feet, but also just whiffing it out of the tin for a bit of an aromatherapy break in my day.
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The base of this salve is a simple blend of olive oil and vegan berry fruit wax. This is roughly a 1:4.5 ratio, and it creates a beautiful oil gel with soft, ointment-y peaks. I’m finding the consistency reminiscent of cera bellina, though perhaps a bit less waxy, and also vegan!
I’m quite proud of the essential oil blend; it brings together a few of my favourite essential oils and achieves something I’ve been trying to do for ages—use ylang ylang in something I actually like. My past experiences with this famous essential oil have stunk, frankly. I’m not crazy about the scent out of the bottle, and I quickly found it tends to overwhelm scent blends. That said, I’ve smelled some lovely products that did use it, and I loved those scent blends, so I was pretty sure the problem was my usage of it rather than the essential oil itself. The trick was to use a very light hand; at 0.05% I find it lends a lovely sweetness and depth to the blend without overpowering it.
The blend also prominently features dark patchouli and lavender. I love patchouli, but I seem to forget about it fairly frequently, meaning I’ve been rekindling our fragrant love affair once or twice a year since 2011 or so. In this blend, I’ve balanced it with calming lavender and sweet, intoxicating benzoin. I find the first impressions of the scent blend are a beautifully mingled blend of lavender and patchouli; I’m not entirely sure what I’m smelling at first, but it’s deep and sweet. The benzoin edges in quickly with its sweet vanilla-y goodness, and the ylang-ylang dances across at the end, bringing some exotic depth without overpowering the blend.
Patchouli is said to be grounding and balancing, while lavender is calming and soothing. Benzoin is said to be relaxing, while ylang-ylang is supposed to help with stress and anxiety. With the business and stress of autumn setting in, this blend seemed very timely. I also find its warmth and complexity to be well suited to this time of change and shifting seasons. I hope you enjoy this fragrant salve as much as I do!
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Creamy Autumn Grounding Salve
Heated phase
64.36g | 80.45% olive oil
14.4g | 18% berry fruit waxCool down phase
0.4g | 0.5% vitamin E oil
0.16g | 0.2% dark patchouli essential oil
0.4g | 0.5% lavender essential oil
0.24g | 0.3% benzoin resinoid
0.04g | 0.05% ylang ylang essential oilPrepare a water bath by bringing about 3cm/1″ of water to a bare simmer over low to medium-low heat in a small saucepan.
Weigh the heated phase ingredients into a small heat-resistant glass measuring cup. Place the measuring cup in your prepared water bath to melt everything through.
After about 20–30 minutes everything should be completely melted through. Remove the water bath from the heat, remove the measuring cup from the water bath, and dry it off with a dish towel. Stir with a flexible silicone spatula to incorporate and leave to cool.
When the salve is cool it’s time to incorporate our cool down ingredients. Because cool down ingredients are present at very low amounts you’ll need to use an accurate scale—preferably one accurate to 0.01g. As these more accurate scales tend to have fairly low (100–200g) maximum weights you won’t be able to put the entire batch of salve on that scale without blowing it out. So—grab a smaller dish and weigh the cool down ingredients into that, using the more accurate scale. Add a scoop of the soft salve to the dish, stir to thoroughly incorporate, and then stir all of that back into the master batch of salve. Doing it this way minimizes the amount of cool down ingredients lost to the secondary container.
That’s it! Package up your salve in a tin or two and you’re done. I used some white metal tins from YellowBee; an 80g batch will fill one 60g tin and one 30g (1.06oz) tin.To use, smooth it over dry skin for a skin-softening aromatherapy treat. Enjoy!
Because this salve is 100% oil based, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.
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 80g. Be aware that scaling the formula down much will make it hard to weigh out the essential oils; at 80g we barely need 2 drops of ylang-ylang essential oil.
- To learn more about the ingredients used in this recipe, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
- You can use a different liquid oil; I’d choose something with a fast to average absorption speed.
- I don’t recommend substituting the berry wax. If you’re going to, cera bellina would be the best choice. Review this guide to get an idea of how to adjust the percentages to get a similar consistency.
- You can use a different essential oil blend, but the essential oil blend is a really big part of this project so if you do something else you’re making a pretty different product.
Gifting Disclosure
The berry fruit wax was gifted by Cosma Craft Supplies. The ylang ylang essential oil was gifted by Plant’s Power. The white tins were gifted by YellowBee.
This sounds beautiful. But since I don’t have berry wax and still must use up my stock of older ingredients -and soon- I’m taking the perfect for me scent blend and searching for an older recipe if yours, to use it with.
I don’t think its the Bills Lavender Salve, but may have to use that one if I can’t find what I’m looking for.
If you remember before I find it, let me know please!
It was a salve or hand cream, had a dryness but greasiness that was perfect for nighttime doses and rough elbows. I say greasy but so dry that it was an acceptable greasy. I don’t know if this makes sense, but you made it and its my favorite Rx for dry skin areas.
I adore patchouli, my house now is permanently permeated with the scent after years of diffusing. And I love ylang ylang but agree, its hard to blend it right. It almost makes me sick for being so sweet. Benzoin is the best and lavender…I like it now versus love it as I used to before overusing it. Wish I hadn’t don’t that but I did. But, there’s NOTHING like your lemon and lavender lotion from years ago. Its timeless.
I could try subbing cera bellina for the berry wax but I don’t like doing the math, Marie. Just too lazy and that’s why I’m glad you like figuring this stuff out. Don’t stop!
Alright. The Cera Bellina as a direct weight/weight sub for the berry wax was a good success, though it doesn’t look exactly like Marie’s images. Additionally, like she states in the post, it is more waxy and not vegan. However, I love it. I put it in little tins and have them all over the house and one in my purse now. So if all you have a cera bellina, it’s worth a try. The end result is really nice.
My only comment would be to maybe use refined olive oil to really let the EO blend shine through. I used extra virgin, cuz I like the smell of olive oil, and the EO blend was not strong enough to cover it up. Just something to keep in mind.
Thank you, Kittyspawn! You were brave to try this without doing the math 🙂
That eo blend sounds amazing.
hi! the blend of these EO’s, sounds divine, Marie! Thank you for this lovely autumn salve, but as Christie mentioned, no berry wax, and I too am wondering if this blend, if doubled, could be incorporated somehow into the winter hand butter recipe? I also do not have Cera bellina at this time. Thank you! 🙂
Hi Marie! I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your book and I was wondering if you were planning on writing another book? Yes…I honestly enjoyed it THAT much!!
Thank you for all of your hard work!
I adore the idea of this with cold, dry winter coming up, so I’m going to make it is is, subbing the cera bellina as written. In reviewing the guide Marie listed, I think it will work well. I’ll let you know! My experience with using cera bellina is it’s critical to stir it often during cool down to maintain the jelly like texture. Hope that helps!
Ooh this sounds great, I am not a fan of ylang ylang, but love patchouli, lavender and benson. I am definitely making this at the weekend, plus a batch for my sister, she could do with something to calm her down and help with stress. I hope it works well with cera bellina though as I can’t find any fruit wax.
Thank you for another great recipe Marie, what did we ever do without you? 🙂