DIY Lotion Bars

What in the heck is a Lotion Bar?  I had never heard of these before in my life until I pinned this from Little House in the Suburbs. Why would you even want to make a lotion bar when you have a Bath and Body Works close by?  I mean, seriously, how can you beat their cucumber and melon lotion?

Well, after reading Deanna’s post, I quickly found out why I am going to want to continue to make these bars.  Did you know that some of the bath and body care products contain formaldehyde?

Isn’t that the stuff that they use to embalm dead bodies?

Major.

EWWW.

All you need to make these is a shaped pan, vegetable shortening, vegetable oil and beeswax.  I purchased my beeswax through Amazon.

The recipe from Deanna is as follows:

1 part vegetable shortening
1 part vegetable oil
1 part beeswax

Melt the shortening and beeswax a double boiler or a little pan in a bigger pan of simmering water. Stir in the vegetable oil. Pour into cups/molds and let cool. Pop out of “mold” and it’s ready to use. The beeswax will fragrance the bars with a nice, light honey smell, or you can stir in a little essential oil before you pour it into the molds.

I didn’t have a double boiler, so I put the wax into a mason jar and then into a pot of water.It took about 20 minutes until everything melted and it was time to pour into my mold.

I was surpised at how fast this started to firm up.  It wasn’t long until they were completely solid and looked like this:

I was worried that maybe these would stick to my mold, but they popped out beautifully:

All you need to do is rub this gently in your hands letting the warmth of your skin soften the bar.  It does feel just a tad bit oily at first, but it is absorbed into your skin and then feels MAH-velous.

Much better than embalming yourself with formaldehyde.

This Pin Rocks!