I’ve been taking a lot of hot baths these days, and increasing their awesomeness with homemade bath salts. They’re wonderfully easy to make, they smell great, and the skin softening capacities are awesome.
Basically, you just mix together baking soda (USA / Canada), sea salt, and epsom salt. Add some essential oils, stir, and you’re off to the races!
I decided to add a little green mica since I was adding lime essential oil to my salts.
Add some drops of essential oils.
Homemade Bath Salts
1 part baking soda (USA / Canada)
2 parts sea salt
4 parts epsom salt
Essential oil, as much as desiredMix all the dry stuff together. Add some essential oils and stir to break up clumps. Use promptly in a hot bath! (I like to use a quarter cup for my ‘part’).
Stay tuned to find out how to turn these bath salts into cute little bath pebbles!
Stir to break up the clumps and off you go!
This looks super easy! I use epsom salts a lot in the bath to soothe my skin, I can’t wait to get some nice smelling oils to make them into fancy bath salts 🙂
Do you know anything about “exploding” bath salts?!? I made some very simple bath salts for a friend – epsom salts, dead sea salt, baking soda, fragrance and maybe a little cornstarch (can’t remember), packaged in a glass mason jar, and voila. Well, she gets back to me a few weeks later and says they exploded in a big cloud of dust when she twisted the lid off – the pressure was enough that they went EVERYWHERE. Lucky they didn’t blow up the glass which I am sure it would have eventually!! Something so simple gone so wrong!
How strange! My best guess would be a base/acid reaction between the baking soda and the dead sea salt or fragrance… I’m not having much luck figuring out the pH of dead sea salt, and it would depend on the fragrance you used, I suppose, but something in those bath salts must have been acidic enough to react with the baking soda!
I’m very excited about making bath salts. Why do the have to be used promptly? Can it be saved (closed container) for later?
You can save them for later—the only thing you might notice is that the scent of the EOs will likely weaken, and the baking soda might react a bit with some of the other ingredients and be inert by the time you use it.
Hi Marie,
I noticed that with some of your older recipes, you stop suggesting making them if they include baking soda.
I’d like to get into bath salts and this looks super easy to play around with. But given the above, would you still recommend to use this recipe?
I’m ok with baking soda in bath salts as it is very heavily diluted in bath water 🙂 Happy making!
Hi, do we need to dilute the essential oil in carrier oil before we mix it into the salt? Thank you.
Hi Cora! I highly recommend checking out some of my newer bath salts formulations instead—this one is really old and definitely not my best work 🙂 Here are some far better formulations: French Spa Bath Salts + Popping Cocoa Coconut Bath Salts + Lavender Oat Foaming Bath Salts. Happy making!