Today my friend Kate and I set out to make lotion that we could gift for Christmas and use on our kids. We found a few recipes but ultimately ended up just making our own recipe based on what we had and how we wanted it to turn out.
It wasn’t the fastest process ever but it was worth it because we made a quadruple batch of the recipe and once you’re doing it you can easily have more than one batch going at a time.
We used avocado and almond oil interchangeably, so our lotion is half and half of these as the base. Then we had coconut oil, Shea butter and cacao butter and vanilla. The cacao butter is the block in the picture above.
Here’s the recipe:
1. In a mason jar add:
1/2 cup almond or avocado oil
1/4 cup coconut oil
1/4 cup Shea butter
2 tbsp cacao butter (we may have been a bit generous on this)
1 tsp vanilla (doesn’t blend in until it’s cooled and you mix it)
2. Heat this up and stir along the way. You can just set your jar upright in a pan of water on the stove and put it on about medium heat. Loosely cover the jar.
3. Once it is all melted together, put in the freezer (works faster if you put it in smaller containers to cool it down). Wait for it to solidify but not freeze.
4. Now take it back out of the jars and put it in a mixer or Vitamix and whip it. After a few seconds of whipping, add your essential oils to give it an even better scent and make it even better for your skin.
We did Bergamot, Cinnamon and White Fir for one batch, Balance and Frankincense for another, Citrus Bliss and Lemon for the third and simply Lemongrass for the largest batch.
Then bottle it and you’re done! This recipe yields 4 six ounce jars about 3/4 full.
We used doTERRA oils for all of them, and Young Living would be equally good. The amount varied depending on how many kinds we were putting in and based on scent. It took a lot more Citrus Bliss than Lemongrass to noticeably take on the scent of the oil.
Mason jars were from Amazon and the glass jars Kate just had so we were lucky there.
Altogether we spent $87 on our 17 jars, so if you already have essential oils, you can plan on about $23 per batch or around $5 per jar. The beauty is that it is worth more than a bottle twice the size that is full of chemicals from the store, not to mention it will go farther because it is more nourishing. The lotion is a bit greasy but doesn’t stain and soaks in after just a few minutes (or less).
The whole kitchen smelled amazing in this process so we reaped benefits far beyond the lotion itself and it was a perfect Saturday afternoon 🙂
Enjoy and please comment if you have questions or I left something out!
~Much love from Alex of the Braskey Homestead and Kate from the Wollersheim Plantation.
the braskey homestead 