Homemade Lotion

How to Make Homemade Lotion
Lotions are Emulsions
Like other bath and body products, many of the ingredients are the same. Now a lotion is what we call an emulsion. An emulsion is a mixture of twoor more liquids that normally wouldn’t stay mixed together, in our case two of the most common, oil and water.
If we take a jar of oil and water. I’ve added a little coloring to the water here so youcan see it better. Shake it up. It will mix together and stay mixed together for a little while. But pretty much as soon as we set it down, the oil and water start to separate. You don’t want yourlotion doing that, so to the basic ingredients of oil and water we add an emulsifier.
Emulsifying Ingredients are Needed for Lotion
One of the earliest ever used was actually a combination of boraxand beeswax. If you get them in just the right balance, they will emulsify oil and water. There are lots of lotion emulsifiers out there. The one we’re going to use today is one of the most versatileand popular. It’s called emulsifying or E wax and it’s a great all purpose emulsifier for both lotions and creams.
So a lotion is made up of a water part, which we’ll call the "water phase" and the oilpart, which we’ll call the "oil phase." Then we have our emulsifier, the E-wax.
Lotions Require Preservatives
The last part you add are any additive. This is where you would add your fragrance.There is one more very important additive you need to add to your lotions and that is a preservative. You don’t want any bacteria, mold or other icky stuff growing in your lotion, so you must add apreservative if you’re going to keep your lotion more than a few days.
Now, there’s nothing to be afraid of with preservatives, but they must be used correctly to be effective in your products. We don’thave time in this presentation to go into all the details of how to properly use preservatives so I’ll refer you back the candle and soapmaking site at About.com for more information on the proper...