Lately I’ve been feeling a pull back to “natural homemade” interests. Last week I met with a friend and we pooled our resources to try out a recipe for homemade lotion bars that I found on the internet. It was fun! And it was super easy.

While the kids played together, my friend and I got busy in the kitchen, making two batches of 6 bars in very little time. The recipe calls for coconut oil and either shea or cocoa butter or both. After polling my Facebook page, I decided to go with both, since they both have different benefits and since we don’t have allergy issues with either.

Melting shea butter, cocoa butter, coconut oil & bees wax pastilles in the double boiler.

It didn’t take long for the ingredients to melt in the double boiler. We did decide to add the optional Vitamin E oil to our lotion bars, since it’s winter and we thought our dry skin might appreciate that. To scent our lotion bars, we added orange essential oil and mint essential oil to one batch, and orange oil and vanilla essential oil to the second batch.

The recipe that we used filled one silicone mold perfectly. Quite convenient, right? We were kind of impatient so we were scraping off the little drips that had hardened on the mold and rubbing it into our hands. =) After letting it sit overnight we had these cute little star-shaped homemade lotion bars.

Thoughts for next time:

  • My friend said the other recipe she made before called for less bees wax, and after trying this one with more bees wax, she thinks the first one didn’t have enough and this one has a smidge too much. These work great, but it does make it a little harder to clean up the cooking utensils and it’s a little more work to rub it into the skin. Next time we’ll split the difference and see if we like that best.
  • I was warned that I may or may not like the smell of the shea butter. It’s not bad, but I think it’s the only part of the fragrance that I don’t like. (That is, I think the shea butter is what I’m picking up on, and not something else.) So next time I might use just cocoa butter to see if I like it even better.

Other than those two things, we are well pleased with the results. They’re easy to make, easy to use, they work well. It seems like you use very little in one use, too, so they’ll probably last quite a while. We shall see!!

*In case you missed the link above, this is a link to the recipe that we used last week, on my Naturally & Healthy pinboard.*

Have you done homemade lotion bars before? Which recipe did you use, which essential oils and butters did you use? Do tell!

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Amber

Hey, y’all! I’m Amber and I wear many hats. I drink a ton of coffee and I’m constantly sweeping crumbs off the floor. After 20+ years of homeschooling, we are starting over at preschool with our fourth, Lil Miss Mouse. She keeps us young and she’s the main reason for my excessive coffee consumption. Drink up!