Actually making great beauty products when you use all natural items is really pretty easy. The hard part is creating the labels and honestly some will jeer at the all natural approach. Anyone who studies chemistry will be taught that synthesized products are chemically the same as nature's. I argued that with my first chemistry teacher and I will tell you why. Through out history when ever man has made a discovery he had a tendency to believe he discovered everything there was to discover and now knew it all.
Any doctor that is honest with you will tell you that he can not be absolutely sure of the outcome of any treatment because there is "most of the time" and then there are the people who always seem to end up being the exceptions. When the human genome project was finished we found out that genes are more complex than we thought and they seem to work together and diseases can be a result of more than one gene.
Okay now I digressed from my topic. The whole point is that I didn't believe everything I was taught was the absolute and complete truth for two reasons. One is that nature is so complex and the other who knows if we could detect everything in an atom or not. It turns out that physicist have found out that what was believed to be empty space really was not. It was just that we couldn't detect what is between the electrons, neutrons and protons. They call those things really funny names like quarks and leptons and then there is the matter of anti matter. Yep that's a pun. Oh and than dark matter is also being studied.
Okay so now you have an idea of why I have my point of view. So now onto how simple it is to moisturize you skin, visibly reduce wrinkles and possibly create a mood with a perfume.
First you need to decide which oils or butters you would like to use. If you want to make lip balms in stick form you will need a bit of wax as well. You can find recipes and suggestions everywhere all over the internet. The amazing part of all of this is the controversy. I will admit some people do go too far when making promises. But remember what I said about absolutes and the intricate differences between one human being and another (even when related).
Basically for butters you will most likely need to heat them up gently, then carefully measure any oils you want to combine with the butter, oils are best weighed rather than measured (some oils need to soak for a bit in a warm water bath). Also some oils are delicate and shouldn't be added to melted butter that is piping hot. Most sites that sell these types of items will tell you the minimum and maximum percentage that should be used. If you are using essential oils, please be very careful. Some are extremely sensitive to heat and the percentage should never be more than 3% for a healthy person (excluding children and the elderly).
If you want to add essential oils into your personally crafted product, then here is what you need to know. First off essential oils are generally sold in mls, 30 mls is equal to one ounce and 20 drops is equal to 1 ml. This gives you a basis for calculating how much you should add.
So how I calculate that is if I am making 4 oz of butter and oil mixture, then I can look at it two ways. I can multiply 4 oz times 30 mls per ounce and multiply that times 0.03 (3 percent) and that will give me the number of mls. Or I can take the 4 oz and multiply that by 0.03 and then multiply the result by 30. Either way it should come out the same. If you end up with an odd amount, then that is where you would use the information that there is 20 drops in one ml. So a 1/2 ml would be 10 drops. Oh and those drops are assuming that you are using a reducer that usually comes with essential oils (unless you purchase a really huge quantity). If you don't get a reduce then purchase some 15 ml bottles with reducers, not sure who all sells them but I know that Wyndmere does.
When you read some books on aromatherapy you can get easily confused because different books say different oils do different things. The truth is that some essential oils are multi taskers and very complex molecules. Some of the molecules and their behaviors have now been identified. Some of so complex that they can not be generalized into a specific functional group's behavior.
The toughest is the mood and mental/emotional oils. What relaxes one person can actually have an opposite affect on someone else. I tried a euphoric bath oil blend and it almost put me to sleep. My daughter drinks coffee and gets really tired because she has ADD or is it ADHD, which ever. So that gives you a taste of what you can do and how complex it all can be. Just want to share one other little fact. My boyfriend has an aunt who swears that the only thing that has ever helped her chapped lips was Vaseline (which is a petroleum product).
