I made rose water the other day and I wanted to write the recipe here, so I don’t forget 🙂 I’m fortunate in that I have a variety of roses growing outside my house – so I can make rose water for free 🙂
Instructions
Put 1 packed cup of rose petals in a heat-resistance bowl. Cover it with 2 cups of boiling water. Cover the bowl and let steep for 30 minutes. Filter the liquid with cheesecloth into a jar, discard the petals & cheesecloth and cover the jar. Add 1 Tbsp. vodka and/or keep in the refrigerator. It should last about 10 days.
Recipe from http://www.ehow.com/how_2123201_make-rosewater.html
This rose water is not for consumption. If you want a cooling and exotic rose water drink, try this one.
Category: Cosmetics (Page 7 of 10)
I’m sad to say that while Camila loves making cosmetics with me (just as she loves baking/cooking with me), Mika has not been very enthused about it. I’m not really sure why, but she’s also not into baking & cooking, so it’s probably related.
In any case, after buying some more cosmetic-making supplies, I checked out The Girls’ World Book of Bath & Beauty back from the library and looked through it with Mika. She liked the idea of making “Glitterbug Body Glitter”, so we did that after she came back from school today.
The results were pretty good, the glitter was much more liquid than I thought it’d be, even after we added quite a bit more glycerin, and we did add quite a bit of glitter, but Mika was happy. Interestingly, she put the glitter on me rather than her 🙂
Body Glitter Recipe
3 Tbsp. aloe vera gel
2 Tbsp. witch hazel
1 Tbsp. glycerin
6-12 drops soap/lotion color
3-6 drops essential or fragrance oil
a pinch of soap glitter or more
Mix the aloe vera, with hazel and glycerin in a zippered sandwich bag. Add the color and mix well. Add the fragrance and mix again. Finally add the glitter and mix.
Make a small cut in the corner of the sandwich bag and pour the glitter lotion into a 2oz cosmetic bottle.
Rub all over your skin.
Update I don’t know how this has happened, but the glitter has disappeared from the body glitter. I kid you not, you can’t see any of the glitter when you apply it to your skin, or when you look through the bottle. How this has happened, I cannot say. Maybe it was simply dissolved in the aloe vera/glycerin mixture. I bought the soap body glitter at Michael’s, so perhaps it was just bad quality glitter. Next time, I’ll try getting it online. The kids are, of course, disappointed.
I’m not fond of my face cream, so I wanted to try to make one and see if I liked it better. Plus, I wanted to make some to give to Camila’s teacher – whom I adore – for mother’s day. She’s truly like a second mom to my children. After looking and looking and looking for recipes, I settled on this one because I had all the ingredients, including home made rose water. The recipe also looked more complex than other ones.
I followed the recipe quite closely. I think it may have been a mistake to make all the substitutions mentioned in the recipe, however. I substituted part of the water with aloe vera gel and part of the oil with jojoba and avocado oils. I also added phenonip, a preservative, so that it wouldn’t need to be refrigerated/used immediately.
The cream emulsified very nicely, had a lovely pastel pink color and a nice, light consistency. At first I thought I’d wanted it thicker, but then I think it would have been too difficult to apply.
I was quite unhappy with the cream at first because when I applied it to my face and arms, it was not just super oily, but super sticky – so much so that it made my skin feel very tight. I had to wash it off.
Later, I tried applying just a tiny bit of the cream to my face (rather than the lot I’d originally applied), and while it was still oily, the sticky sensation wasn’t there. I was still unhappy with the oily sensation – but then I compared it to my usual face creams and realized that they were just as oily. I guess that while a body lotion is supposed to be absorbed quickly, a face cream should take longer to absorb so that it provides you with longer protection.
I’ve decided that I’m going to use it as a night cream, after I run out of my usual one. With so many different oils and ingredients, I think it will be very nourishing. At night, it won’t matter much that it’s greasy, and, as it doesn’t have any UV protection, I shouldn’t use it during the day anyway. I gave it a test drive last night and my face is moist and soft this morning, not at all oily.
Now, for the recipe. I wasn’t sure if the measurements were on fluid ounces, or regular ounces. I decided to weigh all the ingredients, except for those given in teaspoons. I also halved the recipe from the original, as I didn’t need so much of it. That meant I had to modify some quantities a little bit. I’m giving the quantities in grams, as, given the light measurements, it’s easier.
I’ve been thinking of making another lotion for a while, but I felt I needed a clean house and kitchen first, so I kept putting it of. Finally, today, I managed – for a very brief moment – to have a house reasonably tidy and a clean and free counter – so I figured I’d indulge myself and give my lotion-making another go.
I wanted to try a recipe for hand cream – because my hands are pretty dry, all in all, and I don’t actually have any hand cream (as opposed to body lotion, face cream and foot cream). After an extensive search online, I chose this one because it had ingredients I had at home AND because the fact that it listed ingredients by weight made me think it was more serious than most of the other recipes I find online. Apparently serious lotion-makers use weights, not volumes.
The recipe was fairly easy to make and, most importantly, it worked – that is to say, when I finished I had a lotion. But I was disappointed in finding it too thin – just as thin as the regular lotion I made the first time around. Taking another look at the ingredients, which seem to be in similar proportions as those of the first recipe, suggests why.
The lotion itself feels more oily than the first lotion I made, but only slightly so. It does seem to take more time to dry/be absorbed and I think it’s too oily to be used as hand lotion. But I see no reason to not use it as a body lotion instead.
Meanwhile I’ll be looking for another hand cream recipe – if anyone knows of a good one, let me know.
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