From scratch

My idea is to write a post for each product I attempt. These first few are going to be retrospective, because I've been at this about 3 weeks now. Prior to that I'd fiddled around adding things like niacinamide to commercially available products, with decent results, but this is about the things I really make!

My first attempt was a thick avocado shea cream for my mom. She's a shea butter fiend. She slathers herself with pure shea butter on a regular basis. However, she has dry skin; I had to explain to her that putting an occlusive product like shea butter on isn't going to do much to prevent moisture loss when you have no moisture to lose, that you need a product that combines actual moisture, a humectant to draw water from the air to your skin, and that favourite occlusive of hers.

So I designed her a fairly simple cream including distilled water, avocado oil, shea butter, glycerin, stearic acid, preservatives, and fragrance, all held together with emulsifying wax. My recipe was based on Let's make a thick cream! by Susan Barclay-Nichols, whose fabulous, science-y blog has been my main source of education.

If I'm totally honest, I was being a bit cheap with this recipe. I was realistic with myself about the very real probability of failure. So, I used emulsifying wax instead of the more expensive BTMS-50 emulsifier I also have, and potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate as preservatives instead of the more expensive Liquid Germall Plus. Liquid Germall Plus is a more complete and effective preservative than the ones I used, but I was making a small batch that I didn't expect to last for years, if it worked at all....

So how did I go about it? I put the oil soluble products, that is the avocado oil, shea butter, stearic acid, and emulsifying wax, in one clean beaker, and the water soluble products, the distilled water and glycerin, in another. I reserved some of the water in a little cup and dissolved the preservatives in it; they come in granular form and are water soluble, I expected the cream to be thick and didn't fancy the idea of trying to get them to dissolve directly into the thick cream! I also left the fragrance out until the end. I also tested the pH of my water phase (only aqueous solutions can have a pH), and adjusted it with citric acid to about 4-5, so that my preservatives would be good and effective.

The oil beaker and the water beaker both went into a double boiler to heat up and melt the solid oils. I only have one candy thermometer, so I put it in the water beaker. It had a larger volume of ingredients in it, so it would heat up slower than the other. I figured it would be safe to assume if the larger volume had reached the required temperature, then the smaller one had too. I heated the beakers in the double boiler to 70°C and kept it there for 20 minutes, per Susan's instructions, stirring each occasionally to ensure the ingredients were well mixed, and melted in the case of the oils.

After the 20 minutes of anticipation, I removed the thermometer, took the two beakers out of the double boiler, poured the water section into the oil section and stirred them together with a milk frother. Emulsification is pretty cool (I mean the ingredients are warm when it happens, but the process is cool!), the second you pour the two phases together, they become milky white and more or less homogeneous, no oil floating on water here! I blended for 3 minutes, or I tried to anyway. I had taken the beakers off the heat, so the lotion thickened super quickly as it began to cool. I mixed until my frother didn't want to mix anymore.

I set my mixture aside, putting the candy thermometer back in, to wait for it to cool to 40-45°C. Once it had cooled, I added the preservatives and fragrance. I chose nag champa as the fragrance because my mom loves it because she is an aging hippy. :) I kept a little scoop of the cream for myself, before scenting it, packaged up the rest and gave it to my mom. She really seems to like it, though I'm fully aware she likes most of the things I make due to some biological mother-bias.

For a first attempt, this really all went remarkably well! The cream emulsified and hasn't separated, nor has it grown mould or visible bacterial colonies! My observations of the cream were that it is very thick, that I can feel the water/glycerin component in that it feels kind of wet for a while after I apply it, and that the dry-down is fairly powdery and soft. My sister tried my mom's fragranced portion and thought that she might like it to spread more (it has a bit of friction thanks to the stearic acid) and that the fragrance was too strong. My mom likes the fragrance as it is, but her sniffer has been kind of malfunctioning lately (i.e. not able to smell things) and I scented it accordingly. I find it too strong too.

Yay, a success to begin my adventure!