FAQs: Substitutions
Have a question about substitutions? The first place you should check is the substitutions list at the end of the specific recipe you’re looking at—any recipe from 2018 onwards should have a list of formula-specific suggested substitutions after the recipe. After that, check the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia! Every entry contains substitution suggestions.
These articles contain more general information on substitutions, and should answer the rest of your questions!
I wrote an entire article on this! You can read it here. Sometimes, but not always, and you will always have to make modifications unless you are ok with creating a drastically different end product. Coloured micas are made by blending mica with pure pigments; as such, they are significantly less pigmented than pure pigments as a coloured mica is basically pure pigment diluted in mica. For the purposes of this FAQ, “pigments” will include iron oxides, ultramarines, FD&C dyes, and carmine. These are all highly pigmented and concentrated colourful powders. Beyond potency, it is also important to remember that micas are shimmery/shiny, while pigments are matte. Micas are also finely milled and easy to incorporate, while pigments can be lumpy and clumpy, and can require extensive mixing in order to incorporate into products smoothly. Iron oxides and titanium dioxide are typically the worst offenders for being clumpy. I will often use a small amount of mica (~1%) to colour a product without leaving any colour on the skin (for example: lip balms, lotions, and body butters). If you replace mica 1-to-1 with pigment, you will get a significantly more pigmented product. You might, for instance, make a soap that stains towels, a face wash that stains the skin, or a body butter that ruins clothing after application. I mostly use pigments for colour cosmetics, where they are used to colour the skin (lipstick, eyeshadow, etc.). Because they are so concentrated, you don’t need much to get the desired effect. I also use them at very low concentrations (~0.01%) to tint liquid products like hand washes or shampoos. Some examples: The more changes you make to a formulation, the harder this question is to answer. Generally speaking, if you made one change, and your end product ended up being drastically different than mine, it was probably that one change that caused that difference. One variable means it was probably that one variable that caused that one change. As the number of changes increases, so does that number of variables and the number of possible reasons for a different end product. Say I used ingredients A, B, and C and you used ingredients A, X, and Y (swapping B for X and C for Y)—and your end result is drastically different than mine. It could be that X + Y ingredients don’t work well together. Maybe ingredient Y conflicts with ingredient A, but so A + X + C would’ve been fine, but A + X + Y isn’t. There are a lot of possibilities, and the more changes you make, the number of possibilities increases substantially. Sometimes I’ll be able to tell what went wrong knowing what those ingredients were, but the more variables there are, the harder it is to identify where the problem might be. In order to troubleshoot the issue, you’ll need to re-make the formulation multiple different ways in order to isolate the variables and see where the problem crops up. So, from the example above, you’d need to make A + X + C and A + B + Y to isolate if it was X or Y causing the issue. If both of those test versions are fine, then you know it is X + Y causing the issue. If we add a third variable ingredient, the number of experiments you’ll need to do to isolate the problem grows—a lot. Let’s look at “formulation” A + B + C + D vs. A + X + Y + Z. The original formulation with just one of the new ingredients: And then the original formulation with two of the new ingredients, in different pairings You can see that adding just one new substitution (from 2 to 3) took us from 2 isolation experiments to 6. Each additional substitution is going to increase that number substantially. Thankfully, some critical thinking and common sense can often narrow things down and give you a decent starting point: Assuming you don’t have a bolt of silk fabric, yes. Hydrolyzed silk peptides, hydrolyzed silk amino acids, and hydrolyzed silk powder are all generally interchangeable. The difference is in the mesh of the powder. Powder is the coarsest, peptides are the middle of the road, and amino acids are the finest. The finer, the more easily absorbed, but unless otherwise stated they can be swapped for one another without noticing much (or any) difference in the final product. Tussah silk is silk that’s still in fiber form—you’ll get it in a sort of lump of wispy fibers that you can pull apart. It isn’t hydrolyzed, which means it won’t dissolve in water. We need silk to dissolve in water to work with it in our concoctions, so tussah silk really isn’t very useful. If you’ve got liquid silk, you can still use it, but only in recipes that contain water and are already liquid; things like lotion, soap, and conditioner are a go, but powdered cosmetics or 100% oil based things won’t work out. Often times, if I include something like colloidal oats or rosehip powder in a recipe, I’ll be asked if something like oat oil or rosehip oil would be a good alternative. The short answer is no. Those things are very different, despite coming from the same plant (sort of like the difference between steak and leather, despite both coming from a cow). If you were cooking and a recipe called for cornstarch, you wouldn’t use corn oil instead. If a cookie recipe called for chopped walnuts, you wouldn’t use walnut oil instead. In a bread recipe, you wouldn’t use wheatgerm oil instead of what flour. However, that doesn’t mean it’ll break the recipe. It just won’t be the same. If the recipe is already mostly liquid oil, and you want to use a liquid oil instead of a solid ingredient, you could swap out some of the liquid oil in the recipe for some of your new liquid oil, and that will likely work to some degree. Think about why we’re including the ingredient before deciding to make such a swap. If a recipe calls for ground almonds as an exfoliant, almond oil is not a good alternative because liquids are not exfoliating. If rosehip powder is called for as a colourant, its oil won’t work as a swap because it isn’t bright pink. Also remember to account for solubility and state. Generally speaking, you’d hope to replace any surfactant with one that is the same format (liquid or powder) and has the same charge (anionic, non-ionic, amphoteric, or cationic). A similar pH and active surfactant matter (ASM—the concentration of the surfactant, basically) would be nice, but those differences can be accommodated in the formulation. It is also nice if the surfactant has a similar feel and produces similar lather. You can look up this information in my surfactants table and in my Encyclopedia. Your suppliers should also be providing this sort of information. As with all substitutions, the impact of the substitution on the final product is heavily influenced by how much of the ingredient is used (if it comprises 50% of a recipe using something else will have a much bigger effect than if it comprises 0.5%!), and how similar the substituting ingredient is. Before you go too far, you’ll want to be certain the ingredient you’re hoping to use instead actually is a surfactant. Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside and PEG-6 caprylic/capric triglycerides are surfactants; the similarly-named caprylic/capric triglycerides is not, and absolutely cannot be used as an alternative for either surfactant ingredient. The name similarity indicates the source material for these ingredients is the same, but the finished ingredients are very different. You’ll also need to consider the jobs a surfactant is doing; foaming/cleansing is often job #1, but if it is also functioning as a solubilizer (Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside often does) you’ll need to be aware of that and replace that functionality as well with something like polysorbate 20. Another job a surfactant can be playing in a product is to make the blend milder; this is achieved by combining surfactants with different changes. Cocamidopropyl Betaine is very commonly used for this reason; it is amphoteric, and while it isn’t a great lathering/cleansing surfactant on its own it compliments anionic and non-ionic surfactants, making them milder and supporting lather. Cocamidopropyl Betaine is usually the most readily available amphoteric surfactant, which is why I use it so often. If you need to substitute Cocamidopropyl Betaine (or another amphoteric) surfactant you will want to use a different amphoteric surfactant, and those can be hard to find. You can try coco betaine, babassuamidopropyl betaine, disodium lauroampho diacetate, and sodium cocoamphoacetate. If you have a solid surfactant that may work, but the recipe calls for liquid, you can try making your own solution of the solid surfactant in water to give it the right format and ASM. Not all solid surfactants dissolve happily in water—I find SCS is reasonably cooperative, while I’ve watched SCI sit in a jar of water for over a year without dissolving. If the recipe calls for a solid surfactant and produces a solid or semi-solid end product, you will need solid surfactants—liquid surfactants simply will not do. If a recipe calls for a solid surfactant and produces a liquid end product you can likely use a liquid surfactant instead; just keep in mind that liquid surfactants typically have significantly lower ASM values, so you will need to adjust the formula to keep the final ASM the same. I go over how to do this with spreadsheets here. You will also want to take into consideration the type of lather the surfactant produces, how mild it is, and how good of a cleanser it is. I know this can be hard to do if you haven’t worked with both of the surfactants, so you’ll want to read about both and see if the recipe gives any clues as to why a certain surfactant was chosen. If the recipe makes a really big deal about not substituting a certain surfactant, take that into account. All that said—you probably aren’t going to create an absolute catastrophe substituting surfactants, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Whatever you make will still lather and clean, and if you don’t like it very much you can probably use it up in no time if you start using it as a body wash. Please, please, please do not. The thought is tempting, but it’s not a great idea, and possibly even a bad one. Remember, just because something is edible doesn’t mean you should be spreading it on your face! Here’s a few reasons: I don’t recommend it. In the world of cooking, this would be like replacing a spice like cumin or cinnamon (something potent used at low amounts) with something like celery or broth (something significantly less potent in the flavour department that is used at higher concentrations in food). If you were making a curry, replacing a teaspoon of cumin with a teaspoon of celery would be rather silly. You’d lose a ton of flavour from the loss of the cumin, and an additional teaspoon of celery will do nothing to compensate for that loss of flavour. It’s the same with essential oils; replacing essential oils in a formulation with carrier oils is pretty meaningless. If you don’t want to use the essential oils called for in the formulation just replace them with more water (if it’s a lotion) or more of the predominant carrier oil in the formulation (if it’s anhydrous). Coconut oil is really unique in providing amazing, fluffy lather in soaps—that’s why you’ll find it the vast majority of soap recipes. The only other oil I’ve found that gives similar numbers for lather when run through a soap calculator is babassu oil, which is quite similar to coconut oil in terms of texture and feel. It is, however more expensive. You can get 4L of coconut oil for soaping for about $25CAD, whereas 4L of babassu oil will cost you about $42CAD. These prices will obviously vary by supplier, I got these from New Directions Aromatics. You could replace the coconut oil with any other oil, really, but it’s hard to say how your final bar will turn out. Pay attention to the “Soap Bar Quality” area on SoapCalc after you calculate your recipe. Try calculating it with coconut oil and with whatever you decide to replace it with, and watch how the numbers change. Try to keep them within the recommended ranges (listed on SoapCalc in the “Soap Bar Quality” area). Sort of/it depends. You’ll need to do a bit of research/math as well. Different peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada)s have different menthol percentages. Making this swap will work best with a high menthol peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada)—you should be able to get this information from your supplier, especially if they are reputable. Say a recipe calls for 3g of menthol, and your peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) is 50% menthol. That means that 3g of peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) will contain 1.5g of menthol, so you’d need to use 6g of peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) in the recipe to have an equivalent amount of menthol in the final product. You are, of course, also bringing an extra 3g of other pepperminty things to the recipe that were not originally accounted for when the formula was developed. In small amounts this usually isn’t a problem, but it’s still a consideration. Perhaps your peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) is only 20% menthol. Now you’ll need 15g (3 × 20 / 100) of peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) to get 3g of menthol, and 15g is a lot more than 3g; I’d start to be worried about this swap throwing off the balance of the recipe. Peppermint essential oil is often liquid (especially if it’s relatively low in menthol) and menthol is solid, so now you’re using a lot of liquid in place of a small amount of solid. If you replaced a little bit of butter with 5x as much olive oil (pomace) (USA / Canada) in a recipe, that would obviously have some serious implications—the same thing happens with DIY body/bath/etc. recipes. I’ll use menthol in a recipe where I want concentrated cooling, and little else. Peppermint essential oil contains menthol, but it also contains other things that make it smell like peppermint, and because you’ll always need more peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) than menthol, your final product will smell a lot like peppermint. So… use your judgement, basically 🙂 It can be done, but there are some considerations to be made. No. Think of aloe vera juice as cocoa powder, and aloe vera gel as a chocolate cake that happens to contain cocoa powder, but also contains a lot of other stuff. Aloe vera juice is a thin liquid that’s visibly indistinguishable from water. That’s what you’ll want to use for any recipes that call for aloe vera juice. You can also make your own aloe vera juice by re-hydrating powdered aloe vera juice. Aloe vera gel is the sort of thing you buy in a pump bottle at the drug store. It’s often bright green and in addition to aloe contains added colourants, fragrances, preservatives, and pH adjusters. This kind of aloe vera gel isn’t an ingredient that you should be using because it’s got so much other stuff in it you can’t be sure how it’ll perform or how it might impact the final product. It’s also got a completely different texture from aloe vera juice (semi solid vs. thin liquid), so that would be a bit like using yogourt instead of milk to make hot cocoa. You can also get aloe gel/goo straight from the aloe plant, and while this stuff is lovely, I don’t recommend using it in anything that’s not going to be used immediately as it’s highly prone to spoilage and will take your lotion/spray/etc. down to moulds-ville with it. No—please, please do not do this. It is a waste of a lot of ingredients. For starters, vanilla extract is formulated for taste, not scent—and especially not long-lasting scent. It doesn’t tend to smell very nice, and not for long, either. Secondly, vanilla extract is in an alcohol base, so if added to anything 100% oil based it will bead up, giving you little pockets of brown vanilla extract in your final product. And for the love of all things sudsy, do not put vanilla extract (or any other cooking extract) in soap instead of essential oils. Readers that have tried this have reported back with disastrous results. No. Essential oils and fragrance oils are very, very different from carrier (or fixed) oils. Making this swap will ruin your product and possibly damage your skin. Essential oils and fragrance oils are highly concentrated aromatic compounds that are generally used at 1% or less as higher concentrations can cause negative skin reactions. Though they are oil-soluble they do not contain any oil/fat, similar to how sugar is water-soluble but does not contain any water. Carrier (or fixed) oils are liquid fats—things like olive oil, coconut oil, almond oil, safflower oil, shea butter, cocoa butter, etc. They can be used on the skin at up to 100%. Swapping a carrier oil for an essential oil or fragrance oil would be like swapping broth in a soup recipe for straight hot sauce. Please don’t! Note: Tea tree essential oil and lavender essential oil are sometimes referred to without the “essential” part, i.e. tea tree oil. They are still essential oils and still should not be used as alternatives to carrier oils or applied directly to the skin. Sometimes a recipe will call for a DIY infusion (perhaps an herb-infused oil or a water-based infusion) or hydrosol, but you already have a commercially produced extract and would prefer to use that instead. No problem! Step 1: Check the solubility. Extracts can be oil or water-soluble, and the solubility of the extract needs to be compatible with the product you are making. If the end product is an emulsion, with both an oil and a water phase, either an oil or a water-soluble extract will work. If the product you are creating is strictly hydrous or anhydrous, the solubility of the extract will need to match (for example, if you wish to replace an herb-infused oil with the extract of that herb in a 100% oil/wax base, the extract must be oil-soluble to work). Step 2: Check the recommended concentration rate for the specific extract you have. It’s probably 5% or less. Your supplier should supply this information. Step 3: Make the swap! Let’s say the recipe originally called for 30% calendula infused olive oil, but you have an oil-soluble calendula extract you’d like to use, and you can use it at up to 3%. You’ll want to use 3% calendula extract and 27% olive oil in the recipe (3% + 27% = 30%). If a formulation called for 30% lavender hydrosol, but you have a water-soluble lavender extract you’d like to use instead, you’d use the extract at whatever it’s average to maximum usage rate is (I’d generally let the price and the scent of the extract guide this choice) and replace the rest of that with more distilled water. So, if you used the lavender extract at 5% you’d need 25% distilled water (5% + 25% = 30%). Be sure to pay attention to if the extract can be heated; it likely can’t, so include the extract in the cool-down phase. If this was a watery thing, that called for 40% herb-infused water, and you have an herbal extract that can be used at 5%, you’d use 5% extract and 35% water (35% + 5% = 40%). The first place to start is looking up the emulsifier the recipe calls for in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia and seeing what alternatives are listed as recommended substitutions! If what you’re looking for isn’t there, here are some guidelines: Remember—just because something has “emulsifying properties” does not mean it can be used as an alternative for anything else with emulsifying properties. You can learn a lot more about the full spectrum of ingredients often sold as emulsifiers/solubilizers/surfactants here. In anything that calls for water, you can play with the formulation by swapping that water for things that are mostly water. Examples of such ingredients include: All of these things can be utterly lovely in a lotion, toner, or mist! There are many possibilities, and I highly recommend researching any and all ingredients you want to use so you can understand how best to use them. I highly recommend these posts: How to Research Your Ingredients Part 1 + Part 2. Do keep in mind, though, that not-actually-water but water-like-ingredients can contain bits of botanical matter that make our creations harder to preserve. For that reason, I recommend treading carefully, especially if you’re a newer maker and don’t have a good feel for the limits of your preservative. Start with small batches, so if it grows mould you aren’t throwing out too much product. I’d also recommend starting with less than a 100% swap, so if a formulation calls for 70% water you might replace just 20–30% with a not-water water-like thing, and leave the remaining 40–50% as distilled water. If you’re looking for a more reliably shelf-stable way to incorporate some ingredients, take a look at cosmetic grade extracts. They are available for a wide range of botanicals from DIY suppliers and are typically used at relatively low usage rates (5% or less), so they’re relatively economical. Their active components can also be more stable in a cosmetic grade extract vs. a homemade infusion. And remember—when water is involved, a broad spectrum preservative is a MUST. Ingredients like hydrosols and aloe vera juice are ~99.9% water and require preserving. Using a hydrosol etc. instead of water does not mean you do not need a preservative. Kind of, sometimes, but I don’t recommend it. Soap is technically a surfactant, but for the purposes of this FAQ I’ll be referring to saponified fats as “soap” and products like Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside, Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI), Cocamidopropyl Betaine, etc. as “surfactants” (also known as syndets aka synthetic detergents). Surfactants are a lot more versatile than soap, so it’s always going to be a less-than-ideal swap. Both soap and surfactants lather/foam and cleanse, but that’s roughly where the universal similarities stop. Using one for the other will result in a different end product, so if you make the swap, be prepared for the changes. One of the biggest reasons I use surfactants over soap is that surfactants can be acidic, while soap cannot. Mildly acidic products are gentler on the skin than products with a basic (above 7) pH. They help keep our moisture barrier intact and firing on all cylinders. Read this to learn more. So, at a bare minimum, if you are using soap instead of surfactants your product will be basic, and that is harder on the skin and hair. If you suffer from dry hands I highly recommend switching to washing your hands with a mildly acidic syndet product rather than soap—this simple change has made a massive improvement in the state of the skin on my hands! There are also many different surfactants available, with different charges (anionic, cationic, and non-ionic), and these surfactants will have different strengths and weaknesses. Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside, for instance, is very gentle as it is non-ionic, but it’s also a great solubilizer, so I’ll often use it in products like foaming hand and face washes to solubilize an essential oil without incorporating an additional solubilizer. Compared to Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside, soap is basic (instead of acidic—harder on the skin), anionic (harder on the skin), and may require an additional solubilizer as soap isn’t as good of a solubilizer is Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside. Liquid castile soap can sort of work as a stand-in for liquid surfactants, but again, I don’t recommend it. A finished castile soap product (like Dr. Bronner’s) will already be diluted with water, so using it in place of an undiluted liquid surfactant product will result in a much weaker product. A concentrated castile soap paste would be a slightly better option, but it will still be very basic and I don’t recommend it. In a solid syndet bar the product is usually comprised of 50%+ solid surfactants like Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI), Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate (SLSa), and Sodium Coco Sulfate (SCS). I really do not recommend using solid soap in place of solid surfactants in products like these. An additional consideration is preservation: it is not uncommon for preservatives to require an acidic pH to function, and with soap being basic this may compromise your preservative system. While pure soap does not require preservatives it’s hard to guarantee products made with some soap will be stable, so that is something else you would need to monitor if you made that change. As with anything, you can certainly try it, but I don’t recommend this particular switch. The end result will be less gentle on skin and hair due to the higher pH, and you may also compromise efficacy and other “jobs” like solubilizing. The silk we use in our cosmetics is hydrolyzed silk protein, meaning it has been modified so it will dissolve in water. You can purchase a variety of particle sizes (amino acids, peptides, and powder), but anything you get really needs to be hydrolyzed if you are intending on using it in products where you need it to dissolve. Silk is a very unique ingredient. It naturally manages moisture, attracting it to the skin when it’s dry out, and releasing it when it’s humid. Its make-up is very similar to that of our skin and hair, which helps it regenerate. Silk helps add bounce and shine to hair, along with a nice silky sheen. You can try using another hydrolyzed protein as an alternative; hydrolyzed oat protein is a nice alternative. In general, though, a recipe will never fail for its lack of silk (or any other hydrolyzed protein), so go ahead and make it 🙂 Generally speaking, yes, but there are a few things to keep in mind. In something like tiger balm or a tingly mint cooling concoction the essential oils are part of the core function of the product—don’t change them. Are the essential oils you’d like to use lip safe? Essential oils like wintergreen and tea tree are orally toxic, so I wouldn’t recommend them for lip use. Additionally, lip skin is quite thin, so essential oils that can be extra irritating (cinnamon bark, cassia, etc.) are probably best avoided or used in very low concentrations. Also—do they taste nice? A few aromatic compounds (like labdanum) smell divine but taste wretched! Find out and make sure you stay within those maximum levels. Your suppliers are typically not a good place to determine maximum usage levels for essential oils. The IFRA has a database that contains a lot of information, but isn’t massively user friendly as it mostly focusses on the individual fragrant compounds rather than whole essential oils. If you are interested in working with essential oils I highly recommend investing in a copy of Essential Oil Safety: A Guide for Health Care Professionals by Robert Tisserand & Rodney Young. I’ve also found this page listing 400 essential oils and their maximum usage levels and the rest of the associated website to be quite useful. The levels listed there don’t always jive with EU regulations, but if you aren’t selling in the EU it is a good place to start your research. If the the essential oil in the original recipe was solubilized into a mostly watery concoction using a solubilizer, using a new essential oil may necessitate a different amount of solubilizer to ensure everything stays properly solubilized (yes, even if the weight stays the same). This is something you will need to determine yourself through experimentation. As long as they’re not part of the integral function of the recipe (see above), go for it—just be sure to replace the lost amount with a liquid oil or water, depending on the recipe. Oil is the preferred replacement medium, but if it’s a recipe that is almost entirely water (say, a toner with a small amount of essential oils solubilized into an otherwise water-based product) you can eliminate both the essential oils and the solubilizer and replace them with more water. Generally speaking, yes, but there are a few things to keep in mind. In something like tiger balm or a tingly mint cooling concoction the essential oils are part of the core function of the product—don’t change them. Make sure you are using a lip-safe flavour oil, not a fragrance oil. Find out and make sure you stay within those maximum levels—you should be able to find this information from your supplier or the manufacturer of the fragrance oil. If your supplier doesn’t list it, simply google the name of the fragrance oil and “maximum usage rate”. They typically vary depending on purpose (skin/face/soap/etc.) Wholesale Supplies Plus does an excellent job of displaying this information for the products they sell. If the the fragrance/essential oil in the original recipe was solubilized into a mostly watery concoction using a solubilizer, using a new fragrance or essential oil may necessitate a different amount of solubilizer to ensure everything stays properly solubilized (yes, even if the weight stays the same). This is something you will need to determine yourself through experimentation. As long as they’re not part of the integral function of the recipe (see above), go for it—just be sure to replace the lost amount with a liquid oil or water, depending on the recipe. Oil is the preferred replacement medium, but if it’s a recipe that is almost entirely water (say, a toner with a small amount of essential oils solubilized into an otherwise water-based product) you can eliminate both the essential oils and the solubilizer and replace them with more water. Adjust the formulation accordingly. Fragrance oils are typically a lot stronger than essential oils; I rarely use them above 0.3%, tending towards 0.1% as a default starting point. If a formulation called for 0.5% essential oil and you want to use a fragrance oil instead I’d use 0.1% fragrance oil and replace the missing 0.4% with more water (if it’s a formulation that contains water) or more liquid carrier oil (for anhydrous products). Sadly, swapping out emulsifying wax for anything other than a different complete emulsifying wax (which beeswax isn’t) is like using a paint chip instead of an egg because they’re both yellow. You can pair beeswax with borax to make an emulsion, but then you can only do a 1:1 ratio of oils to water, which makes for a very heavy, waxy, greasy lotion. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s typically not what most people want when they are looking for a lotion. I have seen plain beeswax mixtures succeed, but these are not true emulsions and do not pass the tests used to determine if something is a true emulsion. Formula Botanica has done an excellent blog post on this here. Emulsifying wax isn’t a single ingredient: there are a lot of different types, made from different ingredients. All of these ingredients are usually derived from plants—mostly coconut & palm as they’re inexpensive and versatile. Not everything sold as “emulsifying wax” is a complete emulsifier (some are just thickeners, or only partial emulsifiers), so be sure to read up on the precise emulsifying wax you’re considering before buying it. I’ve worked with (and had good results with) these emulsifying waxes: This is by no means an exhaustive list of emulsifying waxes, but I find these ones are easily accessible in most parts of the world. Some suppliers like to rename the emulsifying waxes they sell, so make sure you’re checking the INCI (basically, the ingredients list for the ingredient) so you know what you’re getting. Polawax and Emulsifying Wax NF are typically the easiest emulsifying waxes: they’re nearly foolproof, widely available, and inexpensive. They make beautiful, smooth emulsions and work well with a wide variety of phase sizes and are quite forgiving when it comes to manufacturing methods. Ritamulse SCG & Olivem 1000 are considered to be more “natural” emulsifying wax options. They tend to be more expensive and can be harder to find depending where in the world you live. They can be more challenging to use than the other emulsifying waxes I’ve worked with, but I still find them to be very reliable emulsifying waxes. BTMS-50 is a cationic (positively charged) or conditioning emulsifying wax, and it’s fantastic. If you’re interested in making emulsified hair conditioners I highly recommend it—that cationic charge gives the end product some serious conditioning magic that’s downright wonderful. I love BTMS-50 for all kinds of lotions, balms, serums, and conditioning type projects, but it is more expensive than most other emulsifying waxes, so I typically save it for places where I want both conditioning and emulsifying—if I only need emulsifying, a different emulsifying wax will do the trick for less money. No. Emulsifying wax thickens products and requires a precise ratio of oils to water to form an emulsion, making it ideal for lotion type applications. Solubilizers emulsify small amounts of oil into mostly water based concoctions without thickening them, making them ideal for room sprays, mists, and other almost entirely water formulas that require a small amount of oil or essential oils. You can learn more here. Also—look up the emulsifier/solubilizer the recipe calls for in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia and see what alternatives are listed as recommended substitutions! The first place to start is looking up the ingredient the recipe calls for in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia and seeing what alternatives are listed as recommended substitutions! Please also check the “Substitutions” list at the end of all my newer recipes (generally anything from 2018 onwards), and refer to all the other articles in the “Substitutions” section of the FAQ. After all that, this answer is always a great big “it depends”, so I’ve written a few articles on substitutions. Please read them thoroughly before asking me more specifically 🙂 The first place to start is looking up the wax the recipe calls for in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia and seeing what alternatives are listed as recommended substitutions! In the case of candelilla and carnauba waxes, go for it—they are very similar. Otherwise, the answer is generally a sort of “yes, but in different amounts and the final product will have a different texture/scent.” I recommend reading over some of my oil and wax experiments to get an idea of how different waxes/thickeners behave in formulations, and what they contribute: If it’s a floral wax, that’s a slightly different case. Floral waxes don’t serve to thicken a formula—they are generally used in very small amounts for fragrance. They have the texture of a soft butter, like unrefined shea butter (USA / Canada) or mango butter (USA / Canada), so if you don’t have the particular floral wax I’d recommend swapping it out for about 0.7–0.9% of a soft butter and 0.1–0.3% of a similar essential or fragrance oil to get a similar effect 🙂 Example: if a formulation called for 1% rose wax you could replace it with 0.8% mango butter and 0.2% rose fragrance oil. If it’s orange wax, that’s another entirely different case. Orange wax is actually liquid—it’s not waxy in the slightest. A good alternative would be jojoba oil (USA / Canada) or another medium weight carrier oil with a few drops of orange essential oil. You could also blend the jojoba with a bit of buriti or sea buckthorn seed oil to get the orange tint that orange wax brings to products.Substitutions
Are the essential oils part of the function?
If it’s a lip product
What are the maximum usage levels for the new essential oils you want to use?
If it’s solubilized
Want to leave out the essential oils entirely?
Are the essential oils part of the function?
If it’s a lip product
What is the maximum usage level for the fragrance oil you want to use?
If it’s solubilized
Want to leave out the essential oils entirely?
Want to use a different amount?
Waxes & Pseudo-Waxes
Thickeners
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