A few weeks ago one of my yoga classmates gifted me a bag of rose powder. She’d heard about my DIY tendencies (addiction) and thought I could put it to good use. Exciting! This gentle face mask is the first of what will likely be many projects involving it.
The rose powder is from a local store called The Light Cellar, and as best I can figure, it’s just ground up rose petals. The powder isn’t water soluble, so it’s definitely still got lots of plant fiber in it. It’s a soft, light, pale pink powder that smells lightly of roses. Mountain Rose Herbs sells it, or you could make your own by grinding up dried rose petals.
I’ve started things off by blending a bit of raw honey into some water. I always recommend using local honey—checking out your local farmer’s market is a good place to start. I also love to pick up honey when I travel. The one pictured here is from a farmer’s market in Invermere, BC.
Once you’ve got the water bit all done up, all that’s left is to start whisking in the powders. The rose powder is more absorbent than you think it will be, and then the clay finishes things up. A touch of silk amps up the luxury factor, and a nip of cardamom adds a lovely hint of exotic spice.
The mask itself is quite gentle, with an almost oatmeally texture to it from all the rose fiber. It dries quite softly, and doesn’t leave the skin feeling tight and dry (after twenty minutes, at least—I can’t speak for substantially longer applications). It leaves your skin feeling soft and refreshed—give it a try!
Gentle Rose & Clay Face Mask
½ tsp raw honey
3 ½ tsp water1 tsp rose powder
2 tbsp white kaolin clay (USA / Canada)
1 nip ground cardamom
¼ tsp silk peptidesWhisk the honey and water together. Sprinkle in the powders a teaspoon or so at a time, whisking between additions.
Once you have a thick, smooth paste, spread it over your skin, let it dry for twenty minutes, and rinse off. Follow up with some argan oil.
This recipe makes enough for two thick face masks, so find a friend to share it with!
I have dried rose petals from my rose bush! I’m going to make this for my daughter and I to try. Fun!
Fun! Enjoy 🙂
I love all your posts, but most of the oils you use are just too expensive for me to even think of buying…could you try to put an alternate oil in that a working class person could afford… Thank you so much!
Janet
Hi Janet! My first thought is that you’re probably shopping in the wrong places if everything is way too expensive—are you shopping online? Shopping in town is usually at least 4x as expensive. I am not at all an heiress and find the online prices to be quite do-able. There are links at the bottom of every blog in a big box to my online suppliers of choice.
I also have these two articles on substitutions/alternatives: here and here.
So I have totally been all over your blog lately and trying out some of your recipes for personal use. I am a soapmaker in New England and love trying and sharing.
Also – Your recipe for the smokey honey salsa was out of this world delicious!!! And then I made it on the pizza dough in your other recipe and o.o soooo goood!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thank you for sharing =)
I also took one of your clay and cocoa butter deodorant recipes but altered it a bit and it’s been like magic in my armpits =D!
It isn’t pretty looking and would probably fare best in a container but right now it’s in puck shape on a fancy little tea plate on my dresser.
Here is what I threw together:
Cocoa Butter 6gr
Shea Butter 10gr
Apricot Kernel Oil 16 gr
Kaolin Clay 18gr
Candellila Wax 4gr
Brambleberry’s deodorant additive (pretty awesome!): ( For the curious: http://www.brambleberry.com/Deodorant-Additive-P5514.aspx)
Bergamot EO: 3 drops
Sandalwood EO (my personal private stash LOL!) 2 drops
Patchouli EO: 5 drops
Organic Lavender EO: 12 drops
Cypress EO: 1 drop
yum!
This is awesome, Sarah—thanks so much for sharing! I’m so glad you’re enjoying my blog—even the food recipes! Those ones are often overlooked, but I like ’em haha. And thank you so much for letting me know about the deodorant additive—lots of readers ask for baking soda alternatives and this looks like a great one 🙂
OMG!!! I have been waiting for something like this! And rose powder?? Hello! How do you think it will do in soap?? Please, please, please tell me that you are trying it in soap!
Hi Sherry! I know rose petals turn black in soap, so I’m hypothesizing the powder will do the same. I haven’t tried it, but if I do it’ll be in a very small batch!
Interesting about roses turning black in soap. I’ve heard that about lavender as well. I ground lavender buds with kaolin clay (or maybe bentonite clay… one of the “whiter” clays that I have anyways – and by whiter I mean not French Green clay, lol). I used that in a batch of soap and the lavender bits seem to be holding a purple color, not the original purple but definitely not black. They’re on week 4 of the curing process.
The general “wisdom” on lavender buds is that they turn brown in soap, meaning you definitely want to chop ’em up so they don’t look like mouse poop, haha. I’m glad yours didn’t go brown, though!
I meant to come back and update this my post. After doing some Google on lavender in soap, I went home and asked the bf: “Is this purple?” He looked at me like I was slightly off and said no… and then gently reminded me that everything is off color in the dining room (bad lighting and bright walls) where I keep my soap. I took it outside and sure enough… it’s brown. I like how it looks ground up, but can definitely see how it would be unattractive if left whole.
Aww haha, well—mystery solved! 😉
Rose powder! You certainly like to throw down a challenge Marie. It sounds so innocuous, so sweet and innocent. But my coffee grinder didn’t agree and wouldn’t help out apart from spinning dust from my rose petals all over the floor. So I pestled in my mortar, and strained in my sieve, and sieved some more until I had something vaguely resembling this fairy dust. And I finally got to paint it onto my visage. It’s lovely. A gorgeous mask. I think I shall have to invest in some actual powder – one can sometimes take DIYing a tad too far 🙂
OOh, how lovely that you gave the 100% version of rose powder a go! I’m tempted to do the same in the summer when my rose bush really gets going 🙂 One of my fave new tips for DIYing with a coffee grinder is to sandwich a piece of cling film between the base of the grinder and the lid before blending; this helps seal in the dust and really shrinks the grinding area, giving you much more efficient blending. Maybe that’ll help? Or, you know, buying some already made 😛 Thanks for reading & DIYing with me!
I just purchased some rose petal powder from Amazon and it’s a very un-lovely shade of brown… but it smells amazing! I suppose there must be some variance in color of roses used in the petal powder to contribute to different shades, probably combined with oxidation processes to make them change color.
I mixed the powder with white kaolin, water, and some face oil and had a very muddy looking mask that dried up pretty quickly, but the oil I added kept my skin from drying out. Given that this was my first ever experience with a clay mask, I’m not sure if I did it right — but I also had no idea what to expect! Very strange experience, but it certainly won’t be my last one! Thanks for all the inspiration and recipes!
Lucky you! Mine doesn’t smell like much, I think I’d rather the brown and the lovely rose scent 🙂 And welcome to the wonderful world of clay masks—I usually notice the real payoff when I wake up the following morning and find that things have healed up significantly overnight and that my pores feel all lovely and smooth… once you start noticing that stuff you’ll be 100% hooked 😀
I’m still trying to understand preservatives and the likes (I’ve read your articles/FAQ) but still have some questions. In something like this, would it require a preservative? For instance, if a mask like this contained honey (like this one) or coconut oil so it’s not completely dry (although no water added), would it need a preservative or would it be fine without?
Hey Shana! If you want to make a larger amount of this mask in dry form and then hydrate small amounts as needed (that’s what I’m understanding from your comment), I’d recommend looking for powdered honey, and using a coffee grinder to thoroughly incorporate the oil into the powdered mix. With those two changes you won’t need a preservative. If you don’t want to use powdered honey I’d add the honey with the water when you re-hydrate singe use amounts of it.
If I were to use Raw Honey Powder, would it amount to the same measurement?
You’d want to use 80% of the amount as honey is about 20% water 🙂
Thanks, Marie 🙂