Today I am going to take you into the exciting world of lotion making. Yesterday I decided to play chemist. I have all sorts of lab equipment like digital scales that weigh in grams and sophisticated mixing devices like a stick blender. I bet you never used any of this fancy stuff in chemistry class:
Why do I bother making my own lotion when I can just run out to the store and buy it? Because it’s messy and fun. I get to measure and weight and mix. If I don’t have the stick blender in the mixture just right, I get to splash lotion all over my kitchen.
First I have to get all my ingredients together. I have lots of strange stuff in the house like cocoa and almond and shea butter.
There isn’t actually any almonds or cocoa powder in the lotion but I thought they’d look cool in the picture.
After everything is sterilized and carefully weighted, all the liquid oils go into one container and the solids into another:
The solids get nuked until they’re melted. Then they get poured into the liquid oils and the whole things gets beaten until it thickens and turns white. It still amazes me how these things magically turn into lotion.
If I had Theresa here to take the photos while I worked, you could have seen the lotions splattering as I mixed it. Then you could have seen half the lotion end up on the counter because I couldn’t tell how full the bottles were as I filled them.
There’s what I end up with - and it’s just like the real stuff you buy in the stores. Eventually there will be another blog post all about making soap. Maybe I’ll wait for an assistant so I can get better photos.
