I’m a firm believer that baths are one of the best things you can do with your clothes off (wink wink, nudge nudge). They make everything better, warm you up, and send you away feeling all soporific and lovely. Like a massage, but not quite as good, though much cheaper.
I no longer recommend making this as it no longer lives up to my formulation standards. These bath salts are much better (and safer!).
After hot yoga, a hot bath is exactly what I want. Epsom salts make it awesome, but I wanted to make it far more awesome. So I made a big batch of beautiful post-yoga bath salts. They’re predominantly Epsom salts, to help with soothing your muscles, with added baking soda (USA / Canada) to soften your skin.
Ground ginger and a bit of cinnamon warms you up, and lavender, tea tree, and eucalyptus essential oils calm you down and help clear out your sinuses. Dead sea salts add a fancy factor (oooooh… they’re optional).
I should warn you, though: these are definitely a just-before-you-clean-the-tub thing, not a just-after-you-cleaned-the-tub thing. You will not be thinking nice things about me if you use these right after cleaning the tub, and now that I’ve warned you, I can safely say it’s not my fault, right?
I no longer recommend making this recipe—it’s quite old and no longer lives up to my quality standards.
Winter Bath Salts
7½ cups Epsom salts
1½ cups baking soda (USA / Canada)
1½ cups rock salt
1½ cups dead sea salts (optional, just use sea salt or more Epsom salts)
2 tbsp instant green tea, or ground green tea leaves
2 tbsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon40 drops lavender essential oil
30 drops eucalyptus essential oil
15 drops tea tree essential oilStart by putting the baking soda (USA / Canada) (or as much as will fit) in a coffee grinder, with your essential oils. Blend until the oils are all incorporated. Then mix everything together in a big bowl. Add two or three cups to your bath water and enjoy!
These look interesting. I always find Bath Salts drying. I used to pour bath oil into the bath like nobody’s business (my favorite was sweet almond oil with a couple of drops of sandlewood Essential oil) but then I would get so relaxed I wouldn’t do a thorough job of cleaning up the oil and my husband slipped and hit his head and gave himself a mild cuncussion! I felt so bad!! Now I just have a brief hot bath and then follow up with a thick body lotion. I’m planning on making some sugar scrub cubes for myself and to sell in my Etsy shop. Ever heard of them? Supposed to be much less messy and you can make them in your soap mold!
I find all baths drying, especially in Calgary winters, so I always slather myself in lotion or scented oils after getting out and toweling off. I’ve definitely tried bath oils before, but I found rousing myself afterwards for a vigorous tub de-greasing rather ruined the effect of the relaxing bath 😛 Good thing I don’t have a husband to share my tub with, as I’m sure he would have fallen victim to my post-bath greasiness as well!
I’ve made clay/mud/salt scrub bars and sugar scrubs before, which are sort of like the two elements sugar scrub cubes, but never sugar scrub cubes. I’ve also done bath salt pebbles. I use a teaspoon for the mold, and the effect is super cute!
I just returned from a very frustrating expedition in the cold, which I thought would end with me in possession with all the ingredients with which I could make my very first batch of Cold Process Soap. I thought for sure Home Depot would have Lye, but alas, they did not! Where do you buy yours? I got very grumpy when I was so close to getting to make soap…only to me missing that essential ingredient…
Lye is kind of tricky to get ahold of these days because some punks somewhere figured out how to get high off of it (or something). How inconsiderate of them! Couldn’t they just stick to cough syrup? Anyhow—the three places I get it are as follows:
Hope that helps and good luck with the hunt!
Oh, yeah, there was this big hulabuloo with the soap queen (who owns brambleberry fragrance oils, trying to get legislation passed where their workplace names would be made private, since there are many Americans who make soap and at home and sell it and they are now a target of the young punks. Why couldn’t they have stuck to glue sniffng and trying to get high on white out fumes like in my day. I don’t think we have a Home Hardware in Edmonton, just in Sherwood Park, maybe I should make my husband pick it up on his way home from work 😛 He works in Fort Saskatchewan.
There is a supplier in Edmonton, it’s just a pain in my behind. I have to order through paypal, then go pick it up on the other side of the city. My hubby takes our only car to work, my only chance to pick it up is between 11 and 3 pm on a Saturday. and man, in Edmonton, there are way more trucks on the road and they are agressive and nasty. I am a meaner driver since moving here. I grew up in Calgary.
Hi Marie, I’ve just joined your blog and am loving it! I’m in New Zealand… helllooooo :). I’m making a simple foot soak at the moment that is mostly epsom salts, baking soda, essential oils and dried herbs. It’s a recipe that’s online – ‘lime and peppermint foot soak’ …I’ve made it 3 times now and it goes quite hard and lumpy quite quickly. It’s summer here at the mo so there isn’t any moisture in the air. I put the bowl of it outside yesterday in the sun to dry it out and finally after a whole day it did but now all the fragrance has disappeared! Is this why you mix the eo’s in a grinder first? I tried making another smaller bowl of it last night with a third of the eo’s, but this too has gone clumpy by this morning. I’m a bit stumped!
Hi Pip! I visited NZ three times when I was living in Aus and I just loved it 🙂 Oh so beautiful and friendly, and sigh. I can’t wait to go back! I just need to convince work that I can definitely be a super useful remote employee despite the time zone difference, lol.
As for your foot scrub, from the sounds of it you are greatly underestimating the amount of moisture in the air 🙂 Even here in Calgary, where it’s so dry I wake up thirsty in the middle of the night, our humidity is still about 83%, and it’s -17°C. My skin doesn’t believe it, but that’s what the weather people say. And yes, that is enough for my bath salts to clump up, too. Salt just loves water, so it will find it and absorb it wherever it can—that’s why it’s such a great way to preserve food. I just looked up the humidity levels for Auckland over the next week and it looks like it varies between 60–100%, so it sounds like you’ve definitely got enough humidity in the air to clump up your salts.
And for the scent vanishing—EOs are pretty sensitive to heat, so between the nice warm Kiwi sun and a wee breeze you’ll find the scent would be gone from your bath salts no matter what, barring using loads and loads of EO, of course 🙂
Your best bet will be to store the salts/scrub in a zip top bag, and squeeze as much air as you possibly can out of it before sealing. That should help prevent moisture from getting to the salts. You may also have some luck storing that bag in the freezer 🙂
Have fun & enjoy your fantastic Kiwi summer!
I made a giant batch of this a few months ago (in the Southern Hemisphere winter). I pulled the jar out the other day and found that it had become very moist and a liquid had formed at the bottom. Why would this be? Would it be the Epsom salts causing this? I’m thinking its still OK to use, just not give as presents. It was stored in my bathroom, so maybe the damp worked its way into the jar?
Hey Michele! The damp in the jar is exactly what happened—salt loves water and will pull it out of the air, eventually resulting in a massive blob of salt rather than free-flowing salt (this is why people who live in humid places often put grains of rice in their salt shakers). If you could find a way to store it so you can totally seal it off from the air that would probably help… or perhaps add rice? 😛 (I don’t think that’s actually a great idea, for the record, I’d be afraid of what might happen to your pipes!).
Would the moisture that salts love combined with any dried herbs in a salt blend, put the entire mixture at risk for bacterial contamination? Even kept in a tightly sealed jar, I’m sure moisture finds its way into a bath salt! Would it be safer to keep out the herbs?
I’m no microbiologist, but the reason salt is often used as a food preservative is because, in large quantities, it holds water and prevents water from existing in places where it can cause bacterial spoilage. You can read more here! Considering these bath salts are mostly salt and the amounts of moisture we’d be talking about would just be ambient, it should be fine.