Deodorant + Shaving Cream
After making the deodorant Amy made over at Angry Chicken a few months back, have been using it ever since and I have fallen in love with it. I’m not worried about an antiperspirant so this was awesome, lasts forever and works great. I mixed in Ylang Ylang and lavender in mine. Though, the essential oils were a bit strong the first few days (I’m a bit of a wuss when it comes to strong smells) but they died down quickly. Or I got used to them.
It’s somewhat firm so I just use my finger to get out a little ball and then I squish it between my fingers which starts the oil and cocoa butter melting right away so it will smooth onto your skin nicely.
I bought all the stuff from Mountain Rose Herbs which Amy linked to in her post and bought most of the stuff in bulk so I could make other stuff, like shaving cream! After loving the deodorant I decided to try and make the other stuff I use a ton of in the bathroom…shaving cream. I found this recipe in “Better Basics for the Home” by Annie Berthold-Bond (who has a website with tons of great recipes on it here). You can find the recipe online here for the shaving cream.
I liked this recipe a lot because I had most of the stuff on hand or it can be easily found locally, and keeps its creaminess for a long time. It uses cocoa butter castile soap, water/rose water, cocoa butter, glycerin + essential oil. You can get the 4 oz. liquid pure glycerin from your local drugstore (I picked up mine at CVS) and the cocoa butter Catile soap was at my local supermarket, Kroger. The recipe used 2 bars of the soap (4 ounces each, 8 ounces total). You grate the 8 oz. soap with a standard cheese grater and mix it in with equal amounts of water or rose water as called for in the recipe. It took 3-4 hours for the soap to get saturated by the water. The 2 oz. cocoa butter I just melted in the microwave with the glycerin for 30 seconds. Then added that to the soap + glycerin mixture, some drops of essential oil and mixed in my blender until it got all fluffy.
The shaving cream sets up and is surprisingly pretty firm and even after the cream has been razored away, the shaving cream has a great smoothing + moisturizing texture on the skin. I just store it in a tub with a top in our shower. It lasts me about 2 months even though I used darn near daily. There is another recipe for a shaving cream I may try next here but it uses more ingredients and I don’t have them all on hand so I think I’ll likely be stuck on this one.
8 comments September 19th, 2008
