First attempts at smellies!

[abendgules]

I have a blessed, treasured, carefully hoarded Day Off without Event Travel, and I'm lashing out to spend most of it on my cosmetics project. I'm inordinately excited about some basic chemistry. :-)


I started yesterday evening. I've had many of the ingredients ready, but have been waiting for a time free to actually do something with them. My sources have been Hermitage Oils, and Baldwins, latter as recommended by Ynes and ormsweird.

Yesterday's first concoction was an entirely modern salt scrub, inspired by the sugar scrub I'd made at the Make Lounge during edith_hedingham's hen party last year. I'd enjoyed the scrub but found it too harsh for my face. At Coronation in Arnimetsa some ladies had made scrubs for the sauna, using olive oil and salt, and they seemed to work fine.

So using the sugar-scrub proportions I mixed up some fractionated coconut oil, plain fine salt and some grapefruit and some lime essential oils. The grapefruit is a bit lost in the mix, unfortunately, so next time I'll use a lot less lime.

The first test quantities also stung a bit, so it's possible there was too much essential oil for the volume of salt and oil, so I added more oil and salt, and this morning's test was scrubby without stinging.

My second project was cold cream, based on Ynes' handout from a presentation at Thamesreach some time ago; the core ingredients are oil (this time almond), beeswax (together they form a typical base for any ointment or ungent), and her instructions were to whisk in rosewater with a little benzoin steeped in it.

The benzoin is a hard brittle gum, so I ground it up in my shiny new mortar with a small amount of rose water while the chunk of beeswax melted in a double boiler (actually a Pyrex bowl in a pan).

My first attempt was a bit clumsy and clumpy - I came away with a very oily paste with gritty bits of hard wax in it, and it's a rather unattractive beige colour with brown flecks of benzoin. I'm beginning to see the advantage of buying white wax instead of natural coloured wax and possibly of using benzoin absolute rather than the hard stuff - I have some to compare.

Reading over similar instructions in Sally Pointer's book, her 'Galen's cold cream' recipe includes a pinch of borax(!) as the magic ingredient to help the different components blend (she calls it saponification) - that, and adding the rose water a drop at a time, which I hadn't done - the ingredients were more thrown-together than that. So apparently technique matters.

SO: this morning I rewarmed my paste to liquid state in the Pyrex, and this time kept it warm, and added small amounts of rose water while whisking whisking whisking - I've heard this called hydrogenation (where you mix oil and watery liquids) but I'm not certain where the wax fits on the chemical scale.

Eventually I took it off heat (the Pyrex was bashing about inside the pan very annoying) but reserved the option to return it.

My paste is now much more smooth - it's still an unattractive beige, but looks more like high-quality vanilla ice cream, rather than porridge. It's less oily, the unmixed-wax grittiness is gone, and it seems to smooth into the skin much more easily. It feels like the extra-rich slightly greasy cream you put on your knees and elbows, rather than a light moisturiser.

The scent is still firmly beeswax-ish, even with a great deal more rosewater in it, so I'm not certain what to add to change that, if I want to change it. 

Cleaning the pyrex, and the whisk, takes a lot of hot water and detergent! There may be a new whisk in my sweetie's kitchen future.


What I really want to make, though, is the white powder, cyperus powder, for dry shampoo. I've grown very fond of the smell of it, and am hoping to duplicate Ynes' efforts to get something I can continue to make for myself.

I think I was too harsh on Pointer's book about historic beauty; it does contain several recipes that I want to try, and she's clearly got lots of experience. I do want to try distilling perfume, for instance and making soap (a whole art in itself).

Pointer used a medieval pottery alembic, possibly from Trinity Court Potters, for her distilling.

Chatting on the weekend about alembics and the coming reeanctors' fair in November, blue_dormouse mentioned 'Portuguese copper stills', which are apparently a traditional form of distiller, and sure enough, you can find such things on the intawebs under such a description. It's all in the keywords - I'd been looking for alembics and stills, and only found projects to distill homebrew into moonshine on the sly.

According to the Dormouse, if your distilling is for 'educational purposes' it's legal in England - and certainly I'd be educating myself about medieval distillery.

So I'm debating investing in Yet More Extremely Specific Kit, which is a step beyond the double boiler on the stove.

Pros: could distill water for painting, make lots of interesting girly things.

Cons: yet more stuff in the house.

Comments

[isiswardrobe.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have been thinking on distilling as well. Hmm, do I need it? :)

[nz-bookwyrm.livejournal.com]

Hmm, if it is (chemically speaking) saponification, I'm not sure what the Borax would be doing - in a traditional saponification, you use a strong base (lye traditionally) , which Borax is not!

One tip that may be of use, that I remember from a class on soap-making, if you're looking to mix ingredients that don't naturally like to mix (oil and a water solution, for instance), then having them at as close to the same temperature as possible may help get them to mix (and react) more readily.