Body & Skin Care Recipes
Lotion, lip balm, salves, body oils, and more—oh my! You can make it all with these awesome recipes.
Making Substitutions
Don’t have the oil or butter called for in the recipe? Here’s a guide on how to choose a good alternative from what you do have.
What's with the waxes?
Beeswax, carnauba wax, candelila wax, bayberry wax—how are they different? Can you use one instead of another?
Help, I made a mess!
My best tips for cleaning up your DIY messes 🙂
Almond Oat Natural Body Lotion
Today's formulation is for a lightweight, silky, slippy, all-natural Almond Oat Natural Body Lotion! It smells softly of almonds and oats, is hydrating and moisturizing but not at all greasy, and if you make it as written you don't need to adjust the pH (hooray!). The...
Aloe Mint Hand Wash
Today we're mixing up a sudsy and fresh Aloe Mint Hand Wash, made with peppermint essential oil and a lovely gentle surfactant blend. I'm loving the combination of crisp & cool peppermint essential oil, soothing aloe vera, and moisturizing vegetable glycerin as...
Macadamia Vanilla Emulsified Body Butter
This decadent Macadamia Vanilla Emulsified Body Butter is lovely; it is rich and indulgent without being heavy or greasy. It smells softly nutty with a warm vanilla base note, and it's scoopy and soft like a decadent custard. If you're anything like me, you'll...
Radiant Berry Hand & Body Cream
Today's formulation stars three utterly lovely carrier oils to create a richly moisturizing Radiant Berry Hand & Body Cream. It smells fresh, tart, and juicy, and includes a few of my favourite moisturizing ingredients to leave your skin happy and hydrated. This...
Argan Plum Body Oil
This simple, all-natural Argan Plum Body Oil features two of my favourite carrier oils and some stunning antioxidants for an ultra-lovely skin treat that you can make in just a few minutes. You don't need any heat—just measure, stir, package, and you're done! I...
Super Simple Natural Foaming Hand Wash
Today I'm sharing a formulation for a Super Simple Natural Foaming Hand Wash. You'll need just five ingredients, and I've tried to be really conscientious of global ingredient availability so hopefully you can make this hand wash no matter where in the world you live....
Gentle Oatmeal Almond Body Wash Bar
Today we're smooshing up a Gentle Oatmeal Almond Body Wash Bar, featuring a generous amount of colloidal oatmeal and a beautiful, gentle surfactant blend. While I did design this with a body wash in mind, you can also use it as a facial cleansing bar and shampoo. It's...
Sourdough Body Cream
Today we're whipping up something fun and different—a Sourdough Body Cream. I had a blast developing and testing this DIY! This is a great way to start using fun and beneficial fermented ingredients in your DIY skincare in an easy, accessible way. Want to watch this...
French Spa Bath Salts
With everything that's been going on in the world for the last year, it's been quite a while since I've been to a proper spa, but these DIY French Spa Bath Salts make for a fantastic at-home spa experience. They smell just like a proper, luxurious spa and transform...
Happy Hemp Hand Cream
Today we're blending up a product I've had a lot of requests for! I'm calling this pale green lotion Happy Hemp Hand Cream, and it was inspired by The Body Shop's Hemp Hand Protector. My version is a bit lighter and more slippy, but it still includes many of the same...
Sea Glass Salt Scrub
Today we're stirring up a lovely Sea Glass Salt Scrub, made with a sparkling blend of salts and a beautiful fragrance. It's a brilliant and beautiful body scrub, and you can easily customize it to use whatever salts you have on hand. You don't need any heat, either,...
Birthday Suit Solid Body Wash
This formulation is a really fun and interesting one; it's a solid, self-preserving body wash that I'm calling Birthday Suit Solid Body Wash. You can customize the colour and the scent, and play with different moulds for all kinds of fun! It's also easy to make—mix,...
Strawberry Kiwi Body Yogurt
Today we're whipping up an ultra-light, super-slippy, richly moisturizing Strawberry Kiwi Body Yogurt. I've had a ton of requests for a body yogurt formulation, and I had lots of fun working on this DIY. The scent comes from a juicy strawberry distillate, and the kiwi...
Simple Creamy Almond Body Butter
This formulation is incredibly simple, with just three (or four) ingredients and an almond-y theme. 99.5% of this formulation is almond-derived ingredients; you don't have to keep to the almond theme if it doesn't appeal to you, but you might want to re-name your...
Honey Bee Mine Body Lotion
Brr! This week has been frigid; as I type this, it's -37°C with wind chill outside. It's the first proper cold snap we've had this winter. Along with that cold, it's also very dry. I currently have four (4!) humidifiers running in my home, and they barely make a dent...
Conditioning Valentine’s Hand Wash
Today we're getting sudsy and clean with a seasonably pink Conditioning Valentine's Hand Wash! I went through a lot of handwash in the beforetimes, and that has easily doubled or tripled in the last year. Lots of handwashing + dry weather is pretty hard on my hands,...
Shealoe Emulsified Body Butter
Today I'm sharing my first Bee Better 3.0 project; a soft and creamy Shealoe Emulsified Body Butter that's an evolution on a shea butter and aloe vera heavy formulation I first shared in 2014, and then revised in 2019. This updated 2021 version uses a new emulsifier...
Rich Lavender Shower Cleansing Cream
Today we're creating a Rich Lavender Shower Cleansing Cream—a luxuriously creamy body wash that still kicks off some lovely bubbles. It's part lotion, part body wash, and all-around lovely. I've scented it with lavender essential oil, but you could easily customize...
Sun Bum Body Cream
Over the years I have received a lot of requests for a Sol de Janeiro Brazillian Bum Bum Cream DIY. I found a 2018 request from Nichole and a 2020 request from Leslie in my records, and I'm pretty darn sure there have been others that have been lost in the shuffle of...
Phryne’s Milk of Roses
Last year I positively devoured Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher Mystery series. Set in Melbourne in the late 1920s, the novels star the glamourous and clever Miss Phryne Fisher, who solves all kinds of mysteries in style. I first discovered Phyrne in the TV show based...
Passionfruit Velvet Dry Oil Mist
Today's formulation was inspired by Glossier's "Body Hero Dry-Touch Oil Mist"—I saw it on their website and loved the idea of an oil mist, remembering reading on Lotion Crafter that fractionated coconut oil is "light enough to spray through a pump sprayer". That got...
Moisturizing Repair Lotion
Happy new year, and happy 2021! I decided to kick off this new year with an evolution of the formulation that kicked off 2020—my much-loved Moisturizing Repair Cream (please read that post, too—there's lots of good background information in it!). This lotion-y...
Super Simple Moisturizing Lotion with Glyceryl Stearate (and) PEG-100 Stearate
Today we're re-visiting this summer's Super Simple Moisturizing Lotion to learn how to adapt formulations to use the emulsifier Glyceryl Stearate (and) PEG-100 Stearate instead of emulsifying waxes like Polawax, Emulsifying Wax NF, Olivem 1000, BTMS-50, or Ritamulse...
Ice Palace Fizzing Shimmering Bath Dust
This Ice Palace Fizzing Shimmering Bath Dust has all the fizzy fun of a bath bomb, combined with the ease and indulgence of bath salts. There's no moulding or pressing—just massage everything together, leave the mixture out to dry for a day or two, and you've got...
