After I motored through my batch of Vitamin C Toner in a matter of weeks, I just had to make another batch. This time I decided to make a few changes.
The biggest one was using organic orange blossom green tea instead of aloe vera juice. I also added mango extract and bee pollen, though that’s optional. I just happened to have them in my cupboard and they needed using.
Green tea is full of antioxidants and all kinds of other good things, and vitamin C is great for brightening the complexion and helping prevent acne. Bee propolis and tea tree essential oil are a natural antibacterials that encourages healing. Bee pollen is loaded with almost every vitamin known to man, and mango extract is full of vitamin C and beta carotene. Awesome sauce for the face, basically.
I love using toner when I get up in the morning, when I get home from work, and before I go to bed. It’s a great way to lightly cleanse the grime of the day (or night) from my face. And the amount of dusty ick on the toner pad after use is enough to convince you to do it over and over again. Yick.
Please don’t make this recipe. It’s an old one, and no longer lives up to my quality standards. If you want a better toner, check out this recipe!
Lemongrass Green Tea Toner
125mL steeped green tea, cooled
125mL alcohol-free witch hazel40 drops bee propolis
½ tsp vitamin C or 2 tbsp lemon juice¼ tsp mango extract (optional)
1/8 tsp bee pollen1½ tsp solubilizer
1 tsp Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)
20 drops tea tree essential oil
30 drops lemongrass essential oilMix the tea, witch hazel, propolis, vitamin C, mango extract, and bee pollen together.
Combine the solubilizer, Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada), and essential oils in a small cup. Add to the green tea mixture and whisk everything together. Decant into two 125mL bottles.
To use, pour some toner onto a reusable cosmetic pad. Swab across the face and enjoy the fresh feeling!
This toner is pretty much exactly what I’ve been yearning for (I hope!). My witch hazel alone is just blah, with a side of stink. I’ve tried just steeped green tea, which I froze in little cubes last summer (most of which are still in there, looking all frosty and unloved). It was nice and refreshing, but also lacked… something. I love that your recipe combines things I’ve already tried and feel neutral about, but obviously adds lots of ingredients that will up the ante and hopefully keep my fickle interest. As you can only imagine, I have several questions. Shall we?
1) What’s the approximate shelf-stability of this? Like I said, I tried green tea and froze it, assuming it would eventually go bad even in the fridge. Do the ingredients you included preserve it in some way, or should it be kept in the fridge? I see vitamin E there–is that there as a preservative, a moisturizer, or both? (quick side-note on the topic of VE: which one do you buy from NDA as there are several? I have a drugstore one, but I can’t see it lasting too long.)
2) I do have bee pollen that I found at a heath food store last week in Halifax. Not sure what yours is like, but mine is sort of these dark yellow irregular-shaped beads/pellets. Definitely not a powder like I expected. Does that sound right? Will it dissolve in liquid? I don’t want chunky toner 😛 Reminds me of that weird Orbitz (sp?) drink with the floaties from the elementary/junior high era. Gross.
3) As I had been considering toners as of late anyway, and green tea was still on my mind from my previous toner endeavour, I added some green tea botanical extract (as well as thyme botanical extract and thyme EO as I’ve heard it’s good for acne-prone skin) to my ever-growing NDA cart. Do you think it’d be more potent and therefore better, or would it be just as good (and cheaper) to stick with steeped green tea? I thought maybe the botanical extract would be more stable in a toner, but I’m obviously just speculating.
Merci 🙂 And I’m loving all the excuses you’re giving me for finally getting some solubilizer!
Ok! Answers!
1. Surprisingly long, actually. I’ve got a bottle out right now that I made shortly before going to the UK (sometime in August, basically). I took it to the UK with me, and it’s been on my dresser ever since. I’ve noticed no changes at all, leading me to assume it’s still totally fine. I think it’s the acidity that the Vitamin C adds that prevents bacteria from flourishing.
1b. I get the cheaper one that NDA sells, lol. It seems to work perfectly fine and I am not about to drop $50 on vitamin E!
2. If you buy NDA’s pollen it’s been ground up into a fairly fine powder. I also have some food grade stuff from a farmer’s market and it’s more like what you described. I’d recommend grinding it up in a coffee grinder, or putting it in a baggie and rolling over it with a rolling pin, before incorporating. The smaller size should help it dissolve. If you’ve got one of those twisty garlic mincers, that would probably work as well.
3. I have the green tea extract from NDA, and I can’t say I’ve really been blown away by it. Just use the steeped green tea—it’ll actually dissolve, whereas I’ve found the green tea powder doesn’t really.
Hooray! So glad this has a long shelf life! I always worry about that with DIY body products. That’s the risk for chemical-free beauty, I suppose 😛 It’s good to know the cheap vitamin E is a-ok. I’ll be adding that to my NDA cart… oh dear. I’ll definitely grind up my current bee pollen and use that up before getting some from NDA (it’s sold out right now anyway). Green tea extract has been removed–thanks for sparing my wallet slightly. Though I’m sure I’ll find something to replace it with, haha. I love green tea and always have some on hand, so I’m glad that’s the better option anyway. I’ll keep you posted when I’m able to make and use this toner! Thank goodness my witch hazel will be put to a better use than assailing my nostrils.
Yay for long shelf lives! I’m usually amazed by how long my DIY products last—I’ve only had two or three things spoil on me, and it’s always very noticeable (either super stinky or very mouldy). I almost always add vitamin E to my various concoctions, so I think that helps, but I don’t use any preservatives.
I have yet to see anything I’ve made spoil, but I keep expecting something to yield at some point. I also use vitamin E, so it must be a pretty good preservative if we’re both having success! It also helps that we have an old house. Translation: lots of “ventilation” in the summer, and every room except the living room and surrounding areas being an icebox in the winter. I keep my homemade stuff in a spare room upstairs, so it’s practically like being refrigerated this time of year 😛
My basement isn’t insulated, so it’s a great place to store all my goodies. The house used to be suited, so there’s bits of an old kitchen down there—mostly just a sink, a bit of counter space, and some cupboards. It’s nice and chilly down there, so that’s my room-sized fridge 😛
Lucky that you have a designated space! My poor kitchen suffers quite a bit from my DIY endeavours…
Mine does as well—the designated space is only for storage, it’s not well enough lit or ventilated to actually make things in (my photos would be terrible and I’d probably asphyxiate myself while making soap lol). Finding time to make soap when nobody else needs the kitchen can be rather annoying.
Ahhh, well I suppose the mess is a good trade off for not suffocating 😉
I’m pretty sure the mess is unavoidable 😛 I did some make-up DIY at a friend’s house so we could match her skin tone and watch Pride & Prejudice today, and I’m quite certain I left her kitchen coated in white-ish powder, despite my best efforts to tidy up after myself… oops lol.
Haha, sounds like a great day, mess and all! I love Pride & Prejudice 🙂 I need to reread that soon… it’s been years!
I should really re-read it as well… I brought it on my trip to the UK last year but couldn’t bring myself to sit and read when I could be out exploring! I brought so many unnecessary books on that trip, lol.
Haha, usually I overload on the books as well when I travel. Though for my Australia trip I brought 4 books and read all 4. 40+ hours of travel each way made it pretty feasible.
I thought I’d manage to get lots read with all of my train travel, but it turns out that trains totally put me to sleep! Get me on a train and I’m nodding off in 20 minutes, guaranteed. The train ride from Alnwick to Oxford was probably 6 hours and I might have read 3 pages and then just used my pillow as a book for the rest of it 😛
I completely love you! This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I need to detox off my makeup (and everything, basically) because I just got diagnosed with a gene mutation that limits me from detoxing like a normal human being. You are the best <3 <3
Awww, thanks Dana *blush*. I think you’ll find recipes for pretty much everything you’ll need to ditch homemade cosmetics here, and if not, ask! There’s over 400 articles up here as of now, so I can help guide you to buried stuff/take suggestions for new pieces 🙂
What a cool recipe! I hadn’t heard of a solubilizer before today, so what do you use for that that is safe or pure?
Hi Jasanna—Solubilizer (or Polysorbate 20) has a rating of 3 on Skin Deep, which is pretty good. You can read more about it here.
Hey Marie! Do you have a preference between this toner and your vitamin C toner? What do you like and dislike about each?
Hmmm… I think I do prefer this one as it smells nicer thanks to the tea, haha. In terms of performance they’re pretty much equal, so I’d go with whichever sounds best to you, or whichever you have the ingredients for 😛
Hi there! 🙂 I had two questions:
First, is there an absolute Need for the solubilizer? I make all natural products. Wouldn’t giving the product a good shake before use do the trick? Or am I completely off?
Second, I’m developing an herbal toner at the moment. I’m curious if leaving sprigs of herbs or flowers in the actual retail bottle is out of the question? My base is Basil Hydrosol and pure witch hazel
Thanks!!
Hi! You can leave out the solubilizer if you’re a fan of very vigorous shaking 🙂 Think about a simple shaken oil & vinegar salad dressing—that’s how fast the oils will separate out without the solubilizer. Also, I wouldn’t leave the sprigs in the toner as they will go pretty gross—they’ll get slimy and soft, and then start to break down, and will likely cause the toner to spoil much faster than it would have otherwise. Think about a veggie soup in the fridge after a week or so… something like that.
Hello, again!
When you steep the green tea, are you using distilled water? Could I steep it in Aleo Vera juice? I bought some new A.V. juice to make with the Gentle Argan Silk Milk and was wondering if I could use that or would it throw off the formula?
Many thanks again!
Hi Shannon! You can definitely use aloe vera juice instead, though I would recommend doing a long, cold infusion rather than boiling the aloe vera juice as boiling it might harm it 🙂 I probably just used tap water, to be honest.
Hello in regards to the bee pollen , Do you buy the granules then grind it to powder?
Thank you for all the work you do.
Hi Chrissy! I have both the granules and a pre-ground powder, though I’d never buy the powder again. It’s from my earlier days of DIYing and I didn’t check and see that pollen is from China :/ Now I only buy local bee pollen, which always comes in big granules and usually needs to be ground down for easy use.
Hi, Marie, I am new to your post, and really enjoyed it…would you have a recipe for combining Vit. C and Hyaluronic Acid.???
I don’t, sorry—those are very tricky for at home DIY.
Hi Marie, if I want to use green tea extract instead of steeped green tea, how much powder should I include with 125ml water? Thank you!
I’d do ~2.5g to the total liquid for ~1% 🙂
So I made a version of this today with a green tea extract and some aloe vera. I don’t use the cheap vitamin C, too unstable. I use the MAP version, Lotioncrafter carries it at a fair price. It is still super expensive compared to a regular L-asorbic. It has the advantage of actually being stable in water (so you can actually use it in lotion and toners without losing effectiveness quickly) and doesn’t require as low of a pH to be effective so it is less irritating to sensitive skin. The research shows it to be very safe. You also don’t need to use it in as high concentrations. The recommendations for L-asorbic are 10% where MAP (magnesium asorbic phosphate) is effective at 3-5%. I also made this to be only 4 oz as that is what size my bottle was and I included a perservative. I have been wondering to myself lately, if the bee propolis actually helps act as a preservative here too. I’m not thinking of replacing my preservative with it but I have been wondering if propolis would support a preservative in extending the self life of a product.
How fun! I am definitely placing another Lotion Crafter order the next time I visit the USA 🙂 I doubt propolis would support a preservative; it’s made of lots of botanical ingredients like pollen and sap, which are well known bug food, so if anything I suspect it would further challenge the preservative.