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Need Help With Lotion recipe


SweetPatoot

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Just trying to play with an old, old recipe I found in my gram's cookbook. It's a "simple olive oil" recipe. I can't get it to work. I tried to tweak it a bit, adding preservative and all that up to date jumbo.

Basically, it's equal parts olive oil and water with lecithin added. The lecithin for binding the water and oil together.

I need help with percentages. I really suck at math. So, for ex. if I'm using 1/2 c water and 1/2 c oil, what percentage of a binding emulsfier do I need to add, and what percentage of preservative? Thanks for any help!

Rebecca

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thank you. I'm not planning on using lecithin, I think that's just what was used in the recipe. I was just interested in seeing if anyone had ever used such a "simple" recipe, just water, oil, emulsifier and preservative. I'm off to research emulsifiers and preservatives more. Thanks for the link.

Rebecca

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Yup, that's all you need for a lotion - oils, water, emulsifying wax as the emulsifier, and preservative. If you have more oil than water, you can make a stable emulsion with beeswax and borax as well.

It's fun to add other things...

Ewax is used around 5%. Never have used 50% oils, though, that would make more of a cream. Lotions stick around 20% or less oils.

A chart I've picked up off the web for lotions (as a very general guideline):

oily skin: 90% water/6% oil/ 4% ewax

normal/oily: 87.5%/7.5%/5%

normal: 83%/13%/4%

normal/dry: 79%/16%/4%

dry:80%/16%/4%

My first lotion didn't have anything special in it - it was just a mix of RBO, meadowfoam, sunflower, avocado..

Let's see, if you've got 1/2 cup of water, and 1/2 cup oil, you'd want to use something around 5% ewax for that high of an amount of oil. That's .05 cups, which would probably be around 2.5 teaspoons. Now that's a bad way to formulate, cuz you need to do it by weight to get it down right and stable, but that will give you a starting point at least.

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