Gift Ideas
Need an idea for an awesome homemade gift? Here's lots!
Green Tea Conditioning Hair & Body Butter
Today's formulation is a soft, creamy butter that works beautifully for haircare and skincare. Depending on how you use it, it can be a super-concentrated leave-in hair conditioner, a hair serum, a regular-strength leave-in hair conditioner, or a body butter. It's...
I tried 10 different ways to naturally color lotion.
I'm often asked about different ways to naturally colour lotions, so I conducted a fifteen-week experiment testing out ten different natural colourants to see what worked, and what didn't. Why 'lotions' specifically? Formulations that contain water—like lotions—are a...
Perfectly Pillowy Whipped Shea Butter
I'm pretty excited about this simple yet perfectly pillowy whipped shea butter! This two-ingredient formulation came about as part of my work on last spring's Why is my body butter not whipping? video. I needed lots of b-roll of different body butters being...
Hyaluronic Acid Serum: 3 vs. 5 vs. 8 ingredients
In this post I'm going to teach you how to make three different hyaluronic acid serums; one with 3 ingredients, one with 5, and one with 8. Each formulation builds on the one before it so you can see how to modify and expand on (or, if done in reverse, simplify!) a...
Things I Learned in 2022
I can hardly believe it, but this is the 11th "Things I've Learned" post I've shared! I love these annual posts—they're a fabulous way to reflect on the year that has passed and think about what I want to bring into the following year. I also love hearing about what...
Rich Herbal Body Cream
Today we're blending up a rich, botanically blessed body cream that is perfect for cold, dry winter days. I developed this formulation with the help of my readers; t's creamy, scoopable, skin-soothing, and positively decadent. Enjoy! Want to watch this project instead...
Hot Chocolate Body Butter Bars
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...
Rich Foaming Hand Wash
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...
Hot Chocolate Lip Butter
We're continuing our Hot Chocolate holiday making theme with some tubes of the sort of lip butter I need in the winter. It's rich, creamy, and most importantly, long-wearing. This stuff sticks around for hours—an absolute must when it's cold, dry, and generally bleh...
Christmas Spice Soft Foaming Sugar Scrub
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...
Hot Chocolate Natural Body Butter
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...
How to add actives and other ingredients to your lotions
We've spent the last couple weeks learning how to formulate a simple, natural lotion, and how to adjust its viscosity, richness, scent, and more. Today we're looking at the huge topic of how to start incorporating other ingredients like actives, botanical extracts,...