How-to: Homemade Solid Body Lotion for Natural Skin Care

News flash: I get dry skin in the winter.

Big shocker, right? Or not. Anyway, store-bought lotions, even the fancy kinds, creep me out–there’s always some sketchy chemical listed on the label. And yet my poor skin…so dry…

The solution? Solid lotion bars! Solid lotion contains all the ingredients that are really good for you, like coconut oil and shea butter, but none of the artificial ingredients that make it squeezable through a plastic bottle. A solid lotion bar just sits on your dresser looking pretty until you need it, and then melts with your body heat into your skin right where you want it.

Store-bought solid lotion bars can be REALLY expensive, but DIY solid lotion is an easy homemade project–all you have to do is melt, stir, and pour!

Solid Lotion Recipes:

• Hard Lotion How-to: This recipe, from Kinda Crunchy Kate, is the one that I use the most–I already have most of the ingredients, and I can easily find the others at the grocery store.
• Homemade Lip Balm and Solid Hand Lotion: These two recipes, from Green Organic Mama, use the same base recipe, with the addition of honey for your lips and sweet almond oil for your skin.
• Solid Lotion with Sunflower Oil: From My Country Cottage, this recipe has only three ingredients!
• Solid Lotion Measured by Volume: Although I recommend using a recipe that includes measurements by weight, if you don’t own a kitchen scale you can try out this recipe from The Cheap Luxury, which includes volume measurements.
• Ingredient Non-Specific Solid Lotion: If you want to make solid lotion without being locked into buying a specific oil, check out this recipe from I am an Aspiring Artist, which includes ratios, but allows you to substitute your own butters and oils.

You’ll notice that for all their differences, the recipes use beeswax to solidify these soft oils and butters so that they stay hard at room temperature, but melt into your warm skin. Beeswax is cheaper overall when bought in bulk, and handier to use for a specific project when melted and set to harden in portioned muffin tins or silicon molds–with the extra beeswax, make wood polish, or modeling wax, or candles!

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All the solid lotion recipes also have in common the need to pour the mixed and melted lotion into a container until it sets. Upcycled containers, such as Altoid tins or used lip balm jars, can be re-used for this purpose, or you can use a muffin tin or set of silicon molds to produce stand-alone solid lotion bars that don’t require a container.

If you do make your solid lotion in a muffin tin, however, you’ll still probably need some kind of cover for the bars. Although they’re solid at room temperature, they’re just slightly tacky enough that cat hair and dust will collect on them. Yuck! I sew drawstring bags for each of my solid lotion bars, especially if I”m giving them as gifts.

To use solid lotion, either hold the bar in your hands or rub it against your skin; your body heat will soften it so that the lotion can be rubbed in.

My latest batch of solid lotion bars has peppermint and rosemary essential oils added in, but what I’d really like is some ingredient that will mimic the tingling of Carmex on my chapped lips, since I also use my solid lotion as a lip balm.

Any suggestions?