Pink Sugar Frosting Body Lotion (Recipe)

Hello everybody! 😀

Today I am going to share with you a recipe for a body cream.

[If you are new to the making of lotions at home… you might want to run here! 😀
If you already know the basics but miss the ingredients you might want to read the post about where to buy cosmetic ingredients online (here!) 😀 ]

I made this cream for a good friend who just requested a good body cream for dry skin.
My intention was to get a very emollient cream (which often means “an important and well studied oily phase”) with few active ingredients to do good to the skin (we don’t want to use active ingredients only on our face: we can afford to use some also on the rest of our body 😉 ).

How I proceeded:
Picking the oils: being a body cream I wasn’t too concerned about using comedogenic oils or butters. This is why I used a 5% of Shea Butter (which, whatever you read online, is comedogenic due to its fatty acid composition… In case, you can read more about it here) without thinking twice. Shea butter is heaven for the skin of our body. As medium density oil I added Borage oil and Safflower oil, but the main part of my “Grease-Fall” was made of light and extra light oils (to be really honest Jojoba oil is a wax and the other two were synthetic oils which have the very good property of improving the feel of the cream on the skin. If you want to use only natural oils I will add options at the end of the post on how to change the recipe 😀 ).

Picking the emulsifier: I know nowadays there is this huge fuss against silicones and I can understand why, to some extent: I have found out that the skin of my face doesn’t appreciate silicones :D, I am not saying that everybody shouldn’t apply silicones creams to their face, I am just saying what my skin doesn’t like it: if I apply a cream or foundation containing silicones (even in very low percentage)… the morning after I am 1000% sure I will have extremely small pimples all over my face.
This is why, however cool the silicone based emulsifier is, I never emulsify a face-cream with it.
Luckily this is not the case for my body-skin so I do use it in body lotions and totally enjoy it! 😀
This is why you find a silicone based emulsifier in this recipe: it doesn’t need to be heated (no double boiler needed yeheee!), it has a very very low chance to fail (which means the cream won’t separate into oily phase and water phased easily, on the contrary…) and it gives a very smooth, velvety feel to the cream.
[However, if you wish to use another emulsifier, of course you can. Read the end of the post for details about substitution].

Picking the Active Ingredients: since it is not a face-cream, it won’t be packed in active ingredients; however we do want to give our body skin some good ingredients! For this cream I have picked Panthenol (also called Vitamin B5), Allantoin, Oat hydrolized proteins, Tocopherol (Vitamin E) and I also added some of the hyaluronic acid gel which you can make following the instructions here. 😀
Allantoin is a soothing ingredient. I love it but it might be difficult to disperse it: I found, however, that mixing it with hydrolized proteins helps to dissolve it very fast so whenever I use Allantoin I also add some kind of hydrolized proteins and that does the trick! 😀

Now it is time for THE RECIPE 😀
(notice that dividing Phase A, B and C is not necessary and you could add all the ingredients to Phase A and B according to their solubility… however I am used to do so and so I will keep the phases separated also in case you will intend to change emulsifier!)

Phase A: 
Water to 100 (HERE the explanation)
Glycerin 5 
Carbopol Ultrez 21 0.1 (you can omit this gelling agent because we are going to use a fat-soluble gelling agent)

Phase B: 
Abil Care 85 – 2 (Inci name: Bis-PEG/PPG-16/16 PEG/PPG-16/16 Dimethicone; Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride) As you can see from the Inci name, this is the silicon based emulsifier. You can substitute this emulsifier with any other emulsifier you have, what you have to keep in mind, however, is that the “How to” will also change: you will have to use the amount needed of the emulsifier you have (it might be 3% or 5% or whatever) and you might have to heat up Phase A and Phase B up to 70°C therefore, if you intend to change emulsifier, change also everything else accordingly! 😀
Tinovis ADE – 1.5 (Inci name:  Sodium Acrylates Copolymer (and) Hydrogenated Polydecene (and) PPG-1 Trideceth-6) This is out gelling agent. The combination of Abil Care 85 and Tinovis ADE gives a good silky cream. However, once again, you might want to use xanthan gum if that’s what you have: in this case use xanthan gum at 0.4% and of course use it in the Phase A. In case you have Tinovis and not Abil Care, notice that Tinovis does not bear heat so, if you are using an emulsifier which needs to be heated up… add Tinovis to the Phase C and not before! 😀
Shea butter – 5
Safflower oil – 3 
Borage oil – 3 
Jojoba oil – 5 
Dycaprylyl Ether – 5 (this is a very light synthetic oil which helps giving a light touch to the cream. If you don’t have it or you don’t intend to use synthetic oils in your creams, you can substitute it by increasing the amount of Jojoba oil: the result won’t be same but it will be as close as it can get!)
Cetiol Sensoft – 5 (Inci name: Propylheptyl Caprylate) (this is another very light synthetic oil. I think it is one of the lightest of all. The other good quality of this product is that it gives a silicon-like feel to the cream even if it is not a silicon. However, if you don’t have it or don’t intend to use this, you can still increase the percentage of the jojoba oil)
Tocopherol 1
Phase C: 
Allantoin 0.35
Oat Hydrolized Proteins 1.65 (mix the Allantoin and the Proteins very well together)
Panthenol (water soluble 75% solution) 1
Preservative (at the amount required from the one you are specifically using)
Fragrance Oil – few drops  – I added Pink Sugar from Gracefruit  😀

ENJOY!!! 😀

For more recipes click HERE 
To learn how to formulate cosmetics click HERE
For a list of online cosmetic ingredients suppliers click HERE 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.