Today we’re making a lovely Lavender Vanilla Vegan Lip Balm that’s brilliant for spring. With a light-but-creamy consistency and a bright, sweet essential oil blend it’s just the thing to shake up your lip balm routine as we move towards warmer days.
Today’s DIY is inspired by a product sold by a well-known natural cosmetic brand. A simple base of beeswax, castor oil, and coconut oil is heavily laced with a blend of shimmery micas to create a creamy highlighter that’s brilliant for illuminating cheekbones, brow bones, and anything else that could use a bit of eye-catching shimmer. It gives a subtle, buildable shimmer that’s beautiful as part of a full makeup look or as a stand-alone bit of brightness, and you can customize the colour to be perfect for your skin tone—or to have an entire arsenal of highlighters!
I’m so excited to share these beautiful bars of soap with you guys! I tried a new technique—a gradient (or ombre) pour—for the very first time, and I love how it turned out. These bars are inspired by all things lemongrass, with that herbal-citrus scent and a slow fade from yellow to green, just like a stalk of lemongrass. An ample dusting of gold mica on the top of the bars is mostly creative license (I’ve yet to find any gold-capped lemongrass in nature!), but I couldn’t resist 😝
This beautifully marbled soap is a wonderful example of things not turning out quite how you expected, but being wonderful anyways. My working title for these bars was “Indigo Swirl”, but this batch of soap had different ambitions. The particular level of trace in the batter meant the pour-swirl I had planned ended up turning into wispy, marbley seams of blue rather than dancing swirls, and I couldn’t be more thrilled with how everything turned out.
Our Soothing series continues with this lovely Soothing Cleansing Balm. Up until now all of our soothing projects have included a water phase, and many of our awesome soothing ingredients (cucumber distillate, chamomile hydrosol, urea, etc.) live in that phase. This project is 100% anhydrous—this means many of the ingredients we’ve used before are off the table, but several news ones are now on the table!
Today’s soap is in honour of Robbie Burns’ day, but it also doubles up nicely as a Valentine’s Day soap with its rosy scent and dusty pink layers. I had a lot of fun making this soap, even though it turned into a bit of a learning experience (a.k.a. things didn’t go precisely as planned!). Though it’s not quite what I had in my imagination when I started soaping I love how the rustic angled layers turned out in the end, and I hope you will as well!
Make it Up: The Essential Guide to DIY Makeup and Skin Care is now available at booksellers all over the world!