Week 49 - learning to make natural beauty products

We are all becoming a lot more present and conscious in life.  We're eating clean, thinking mindfully, raving soberly and making and growing our own products and businesses.   A few years ago I saw that a friend of mine really started epitomising that whole philosophy.  He changed the way he ate, started importing products like coconut water and biodegradable bamboo crockery into the UK and also taught himself to make his own organic skincare products.  I was amazed how he had learnt it all, bought ingredients, started experimenting and making everything.  It all looked yummy too. Another friend of mine also makes beautiful skincare products, I've been lucky enough to have been given some of them as gifts and they are all so nice.  I love the idea of using natural products because I have very sensitive skin.  I'm not sure why I've not really been conscious of it before now.

Well, another opportunity has presented itself.  I thought it would be easy to find a one day natural skincare class but in actual fact, there aren't so many.  But I did come across one that I thought looked lovely called Natural Skincare Workshops.  I decided to do the body skincare one and was quite excited at the prospect of making my own body butter, scrub and oil.

Timi Racz runs the classes from her own home in Wood Green and I was welcomed into her small but perfectly formed, professional teaching laboratory.

Her classes are based on Formula Botanica, the word's leading online Organic Skincare Science School, a company that she also works for.  She discovered the brand several years ago after having health and skincare issues and says it changed her life.  She now creates her own range of products and teaches several different workshops including facial skincare, anti-ageing skincare, lotion and creams and the one I chose, body skincare.

Timi began by telling me that everything we were going to be making would be butter or oil-based i.e. with no water.  This means that you don't need to add preservatives.  But, oil and butters do need some sort of antioxidant (a natural preservative) such as vitamin E or rosemary to prevent them from going rancid.  Plus, antioxidants are good for the skin.  

The first thing I was going to make was a whipped body butter. There was a huge range of essential oils that I could use to flavour it and after some smelling experimentation, I chose to blend it with jasmine, frankincense and lemongrass.  The main ingredient was mango butter, which is a hard white fat extracted from the big seed inside the mango fruit.  Along with some oils and vitamin E, I weighed everything out, melted the butters and mixed everything together.  Simple.  We then had to put the mixture into the fridge to harden and I would come back to it later.

I then moved onto making a minty coconut sugar body scrub.  Yum.  This was super easy to make.  A mixture of coconut and apricot oil plus some peppermint essential oil and vitamin E.  Added to that, some dried peppermint tea leaves and coconut sugar.  Gorgeous!

The body massage oil was next and this was literally just weighing out and blending together the oil base and essential oils.  The base was a mixture of cosmetic-grade olive oil, coconut oil and almond oil.  To that I added bergamot and grapefruit for some lovely fragrance.

Finally, we returned to the body butter, which I had to whip with a hand-held whisk to get it really fluffy and creamy.  It smelt utterly delicious. 

I packaged everything up in some lovely coloured pots and bottles, labelled them and that was it.  Easy as that.  I even got a Formula Botanica certificate to say I had completed a class in organic body skincare formulation.  It was really easy and once you know the composition and ratios needed, its simply a case of experimenting and finding what works well.  I guess its just like cooking, something that I'm quite good at and really enjoy.  This is definitely a learning that I'd like to consider doing more of.  Timi's classes are a great introduction to all of this, she really knows her stuff and is super positive about it all. I've already used all my products and my skin feels and smells delightful.