Lipstick for Mother's Day

Happy Monday! Mother's Day is coming up and I have a bunch of ideas for fun, handmade gifts that will make her day. Starting out, I'd like to share with you a lipstick recipe that I've been experimenting with. In my first attempt, I ended up with a wonderful colored gloss, but not quite hard enough for a substantial stick. For my second try I doubled the beeswax and it worked beautifully!

Here's the recipe:

1.5 oz castor oil
1.5 oz jojoba oil
1 oz white beeswax
0.5 oz shea butter
and a TON of color. Specifically, 1/2 tablespoon of cappuccino mica, 1 and 1/2 tablespoon of merlot mica, a pinch of copper sparkle, and a half teaspoon of titanium dioxide for opacity.

Oh, and put a couple butter knives in the freezer an hour before making your lipstick. I'll tell you why later...


Have everything out and ready to go before getting started. Grab packaging of your choice. Use a lip balm pouring tray if you decide on tubes. The stackable clear lip pots work great for layering different color options. Give mom a few choices. This recipe makes at least 25 lip balm tubes.


I started out by melting the beeswax down (for larger quantities of beeswax than this small amount for our recipe, use a double boiler to prevent risk of combusting your Pyrex dish in the microwave. Trust me, it can happen! Beeswax gets HOT.) Then, I put in the castor and jojoba oil and melt it down again for another 45 seconds to a minute. At that point, a put in the shea butter and stir, using the heat from the oils and wax to melt the butter. In goes the color. A tiny bit of titanium dioxide goes a long way. It is really important to mix the color and the titanium dioxide really well so as not to have any surprise flecks of pigment in your finished product. I used a mini whisk from the melt-and-pour tool kit to break down the color in the melted oils.

Here's where that frozen knife comes in handy. Dip it into the liquid batch to see an instant sample of your color. This is a great trick for candle making, particularly with soy wax because you end up needing a lot more color than what appears in the pot. The color shown here looks way darker than in actually is on the skin. Practice before pouring-- take a little of that hardened product on your frozen knife and rub in on your hand or on your lips to see if you are happy with the shade. Less is more-- you can't take out color once it's in, so start with a little and work up to a shade that is appropriate for your project.


Once you are satisfied with the shade, it is time to pour. I find myself remelting my batch as I go to keep everything nice and fluid, perfect for pouring. When you take out the lip tubes from the pouring tray after they've hardened, you have to top them off to get rid of the extra glop on top. The little white spatula that comes in the melt-and-pour tool kit works wonders for scraping off the excess. If you put your batch in lip pots, throw in a little lip brush to keep mom's fingers clean. That's it! For a list of lip safe mica's, click here.

Private Class Sneak Peak!

Hi everyone, this is Kat. We've had a fantastic week at Otion complete with sunshine and two days of private "Design Your Own Day" instruction. I had the pleasure of teaching a couple classes and wanted to share with you some of the colorful melt-and-pour projects we made on Wednesday.






We used the scraps from our plaid project to embed into a swirled loaf for our final project. I love how it turned out! The embedded eraser soaps were made with a clear base and a double and triple-pour technique. Simply wait until your colored soap has cooled a bit (that phase right before it gets too hard to pour), and pour each color on opposite ends of the mold until they meet in the middle. The soap is thick enough to stay in place without swirling together.

Anne-Marie has made a great tutorial on plaid soaps. You can find it here. You can also purchase a plaid soap online video tutorial here.

Thanks for taking a look and have a great weekend!

Newest Member of the Otion Team

We've got a new baby in the Soap King's (aka Erik) house. We haven't named him yet (currently, he's 'Lil' Guy') but you can see his older Sister Sammie is a proud sister.

We've got some videos of the little guy running around here if you'd like to oooh and ahhh and put a smile on your face for the rest of the day.

Fun for the Kids!

These fun little bath bombs were a success and fizzed for over a minute! I used Yuzu Cybilla fragrance oil and hydrated green chrome pigment. I found a flexible triangle tray mold that I used for the tablets, but I wouldn't recommend using a flexible mold because it chipped the edges as I popped them out. A stiff, plastic mold works best, like the spaceships mold that I used for a slightly bigger bath bomb.

Basic Bath Bomb Instructions

• Gather your ingredients:
  

1 part citric acid
2 parts baking soda
witch hazel
coloring of your choice
fragrance oil of your choice
bath bomb mold

• Blend, blend, blend! Blend the citric acid and baking soda-- this step is super important-- if you don't blend well, you end up with a grainy bomb. I use a whisk and then break up the remaining clumps with my fingers. We also use a mixer on our larger batches.

• Once you've blended really well, add your colorant. Dry pigments or a specialty bath fizzy colorant like La Bombs work best-- don't add too much though-- the color shows up once you add the witch hazel. We start with 5 ccs of dry colorant per 2 pounds of bath fizzy mix.

• Add fragrance according to your preference. We start with 0.5 ounces of fragrance in 2 pounds of bath fizzy mix.
  

• Now this is the tricky part. Spritz (with a squirt bottle) the witch hazel onto your batch while stirring with the other hand. When your batch sticks together when squished, you need to start putting it in molds-- time is of the essence. If you wait too long, the mixture will get hard. If you spritz too much, the mixture will be too wet and "grow" or start the fizzing reaction.

• Put the bombs in molds-- wait a few minutes and tap them out. Let them air dry for 3 or 4 hours and voila! Wonderful, hard bath bombs. The harder you pack the bath bombs, the more dense, heavy, and durable bomb you will get. Enjoy!!
  

Mmm, Lemon Cake Fragrance Oil

Yum. This fragrance is like slipping into huge, fluffy socks at the end of a long day.

Relax into a warm, buttery vanilla base with hints of granulated sugar, topped with high fresh lemon notes, creamy whipped meringue and a zesty pop of lemon rind all piled on a sweet graham cracker finish. The confectionery vanilla sweetness overpowers the lemon, so the harsh tartness is at a minimum. What's left is a smooth, mouthwatering scent that just plain makes you feel happy inside.


To make some beautiful wedding cake soap, I used shea butter melt and pour base, yellow mica, the wedding cake flexible mold, two droppers (one for the scent and one for coloring the flower detail) and of course the lemon cake fragrance oil.


The first step is the tricky one--getting those flowers to stay in place. Tip: mix up some yellow mica in the shea soap and stir until the soap begins to thicken and get slightly sticky. It might clog your dropper, so act quickly. That's the best consistency for adding the flowers because the soap will stay in place instead of drip down to the center of the mold. Spray with rubbing alcohol. If you happen to get a drip that is out of place, let it harden and scrape out the oops parts with our handy dandy scraper tool.

Finish up the cake with scented (4ml per pound) and uncolored shea base poured over the freshly spritzed flower layer. Spray one more time with rubbing alcohol to relieve the surface of bubbles, put in the freezer for 15-20 minutes and you're done! If only making a real wedding cake were as easy.

Below are some fun dessert-like soaps made with the scalloped heart and rectangle mold with the same color and scent as the wedding cake project. Just imagine the endless packaging options for these fun little soaps! They'd make the perfect wedding favor. Have fun!