hand salve

I had a few ingredients to use up so I thought I’d make a new hand salve/ cuticle balm.

A lotion bar type thing…except I pour it into tiny plastic pots which saves on a lot of the mess and you can wash out and reuse when they’re empty.

I’m not an expert at this kind of thing, but I do like to have a play around and it’s really easy to do.

Basically I used equal parts of beeswax, runny oil and a hard oil or butter. If you want it softer, add more runny oil or take out some of the beeswax. If you like it really hard, make sure you have more beeswax or use harder butters.

I have a huge tub of shea butter that I wanted to use up and I had exactly 1 1/2 cups of beeswax left, so that’s why everything is this amount! That makes a lot of mixture, but at least I got rid of a few bottles of oil!

The only ingredients I have left now apart from essential oils are shea butter and a bottle of sweet almond oil so I’ll have to find a recipe to use those up in the future.

The shea butter and beeswax I bought from an Etsy shop called Classikool (in the UK). They do food and body related ingredients with minimal packaging and I’ve bought from them several times in the past. They’ve always had fast shipping and their products have always been great. I’ve bought cocoa butter and other oils like Carrot Tissue, St John’s Wort and more.

Here’s the affiliate link to their shop below if you want to have a look:

https://tidd.ly/3n8aJLc

Here’s what I did:

First of all I melted the beeswax and shea butter in a double boiler (if you don’t have a double boiler you can do what I did, which is to use a jug for your ingredients in a pan of hot water).

Once they are all melted I added the runny oils, in this case Sweet Almond Oil and Jojoba Oil and mixed it all together until it’s all melted and clear.

I took it off the heat for a few minutes to cool down slightly before I added the Lemon, Rosemary and Bergamot essential oils.

You need to be careful with some essential oils as to the ratio/amount you put in, but I’ve done this before quite a few times, so I had a good idea when to stop!

Stir it all together and if you want to add any colouring to it, do it now. I like mine to look natural so I didn’t add any colouring.

I then poured the mixture into little plastic pots and left them to solidify at room temperature for the rest of the afternoon and got on with other stuff!

All done!

To use, just scrape/ scoop a bit out of the pot with your finger, and it should melt a bit on your fingers or your palm, just rub it into your hands.

I wouldn’t use this on my face, but it’s good for cuticles, hands and areas of rough skin. It’s really good for elbows and cracked heels…just put it on at night when you’re sitting down to give it a chance to sink in a bit!

These make really sweet and useful Christmas or Birthday gifts for people and they are SO easy to make! And they’re handmade in re-usable packaging!

I thought I’d try a stocking mould I’ve had for a while and never used…it came out quite good if I say so myself! But I didn’t have a tin big enough for it, so it’s in a plastic bag for now.

It goes without saying that you need to double check your ingredients and recipes for this kind of thing. This isn’t really an in depth tutorial kind of post.

For essential oils there are guidelines for use with children (basically use less!) and about how much you use in each recipe. Some essential oils can only be used in small amounts as they can react with the sun on your skin…so be careful!