Finally achieving some work-life balance
and have energy to do things in The Lyers Club (what I call my soap-n-stuff making room) in the evening. Last night's adventures, also without pictures:
Foot cream - much needed during sandal / barefoot season. My husband jokingly tells me my face looks 35 (I'm sneaking up on 50) but my feet look 135... good thing he's cute and smells nice.
Face cream - very much experimental. This is my second experiment with some tweaks and knowledge gained from the first experiment. I was really quite taken with the idea of Shark Sauce (I can't remember if it was this thread or another on the forum), but after shelling out some bucks for ingredients... it was not awesome sauce for me or my daughter. We broke out horribly from it. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole to see if I could find what ingredient was causing our issues and possibly formulate a cream instead. At the moment I'm playing with licorice root extract and niacinamide based on my daughter's dermatologist's recommendation to use a commercial serum that contains those two ingredients to help clear up the red spots on her face from past acne breakouts.
The first experiment I accidentally grabbed the N-Acetyl bag instead of the niacinamide - and it didn't really seem to do anything positively or negatively for red spots, but we also didn't break out. Doing some reading on formulating lotions/creams with those two ingredients I realized that I need to add them at a lower temp in the lotion making process. The batch I made last night was a tweak in the cream formula (swapped out the avocado oil and replaced with sweet almond oil hoping to improve the absorption rate), and then adding the Niacinamide at the correct temp. This cream also uses argan oil, zinc oxide, and the licorice root extract. I did swap out the essential oil blend this time too. First batch used 1% Frankincense which my daughter doesn't care for. We found an essential oil blend of myrrh, frankincense, lavender, and rosemary that she likes and is from a reputable company, so I used that also at 1%.
I tried it last night and based on feel, I like it a lot more than the first batch. I had some concern that the niacinamide would be grainy adding it at a cooler temp, but not the case at all. Also mildly amusing that for such a small batch size (4oz) I used a frother type mixer rather than a stick blender so it's got a whipped consistency until you smooth it out with your fingers. A bit of a struggle to judge if the cream is emulsified and stays emulsified, so I overwhipped it to make sure. Once I get the formulation to where we want it, I'll scale up the batch size to one that I can do with the stickblender. I would like to do one more formulation with the niacinamide and N-Acetyl combo if the niacinamide formula doesn't make us break out. I suspect what caused our breakouts was the sea kelp bioferment but haven't tested that theory. I'll be happy if I find a use for the niacinamide and N-Acetyl.
But now in addition to body lotion I can call some of the better results, hand cream and foot cream 
