Bases vs Handmade Formulation

[elegantnaturals]

My sis wants to get our biz kickstarted and use bases. I want to wait until my formulations have been tested (I have a kick a** body cream that my testers love). Do any of you use both or just one?

I want the biz to feel like it's mine and not something I'm trying to pass off as mine. KWIM? And, we want to sell at the local farmer's market, so the element of handmade needs to be in there somewhere.

[Scent Cellar]

I prefer to make my own as I also make a kick a$$ body butter & lotion. However, I feel there is not a thing wrong with using bases but it's not my preference.

[Judy, USMC]

You can do both and price them accordingly. A local uses bases in her regular line. She adds the words "Premium - Custom Blended" to her label and adds a percentage to the prices for her labor on the ones she blends.

[RobinInOR]

I only do bases for lotions, for safety reasons. And those I won't even scent - I buy them scented and just transfer them to small bottles.

My business is built on making things from scratch, so bases don't really fit into my philosophy. I'm tempted sometimes to get more bases, to have more items, but I resist. I'm not a store where I have to have a ton of different products for variety. I want to concentrate on the products that I do best and have the most benefit for someone - soaps, lip balms, facial cleansers. Buying a base and sticking a nice scent in it isn't where I'm at. Nothing wrong with it, just not my style.

[TwinMom]

So where do you get the recipes to try making your own bases?? I am just trying to venture into lip balm/gloss and wanted to try both: bases and my own but have no idea where to start. Bath and body is WAY out of my element!!!

[RobinInOR]

To formulate well you have to understand *why* you're picking the ingredients. You can pick up recipes on other sites, but you'll probably always want to tweek them to feel better or last longer or look better. For lip balms, MMS has a great generic guideline for making lip balms - they're pretty forgiving. http://thesage.com/recipes/recipes.php3?.State=Display&id=19

It's a 25/10/15/40 combo, but a lot of other people also use rations of 1/3 wax, 1/3 butter-hard oil, 1/3 soft oil. Playing around with different combinations of oils.

For lotions, what I did was learn about some basic ratios of water to oils to butters to emulsifiers. Then pick the oils that interested me, and give a try to see how it worked out. Or you can find someone elses lotion on the web (there might be one in the recipe section), try it, and tweek it if you don't like the feel. You start to learn what oils feel heavy, what feels greasy, what soaks in nicely.