Blending Perfumes into Lotion
Most indie lotions are too heavy for me to use daily, especially in the summer. This is a really big problem for me. I miss out on the opportunity of seasonal lotions pretty often. If I buy them, I usually use them on Mr. J. But I kept reading how easy it was to scent things like glace- no duh, you dump oil into oil.
I figured I’m smart and I could figure out how to scent lotion. The couple of articles I came across first were to just dump the perfume in and shake. Umm……. No thanks. The next one I came across talked about making a hot water bath for the bottle, liquefying the lotion, dumping the perfume in with colored dye, shake it up until the dye had gotten everywhere and letting the lotion re-solidify. That’s sounds reasonable, but that seems like a lot of work, and I’m afraid of melting plastic. So I made up my own deal.
First, I chose lotion- HoG’s Body Emulsion. This is a beautiful light lotion that I use like crazy and reviewed last spring. Pretty much my favorite indie lotion.
Then I chose my scents. My first pick was Solstice Scent’s Conjure Dark (look out for that review in the months to come!). Then I knew I wanted something lavender - I ended up choosing NAVA’s Athena perfume. I have a bottle of jasmine essential oil that I didn’t have a use for, so I decided I would use that one. But I bought 4 bottles of emulsion. And I remembered how much I love apples as a scent note, so I chose Sixteen92’s Last Exit for the Lost- as a perfume it didn’t stay very long on my skin, unlike some other apple scents, but it’s too great a scent to just get rid of.
I’m going to show you how I mixed a perfume lotion and the essential oil lotion. I also used 2 different methods for redistribution. But the beginning is the same. I emptied the bottle of lotion into a clean bowl, free of dust and dog hair. It just took a lot of patience and less than 5 minutes to do.
And now the differences-
For Perfumes
The one good thing that I read was that you only want scent to be UP TO 1% of your lotion. The amount of lotion in a full Body Emulsion translates to about 200 mL, so no more than 2 mL of perfume added to the lotion. This is the other reason I chose the perfumes I did- I had a larger sample of Sixteen92, a lot of Conjure Dark, and I ordered what I needed for the NAVA scent. For me, 2 mL seemed to be the correct amount of perfume.
Using a clean silicone spatula, I stirred it for at least a minute, making sure that the perfume had oozed its way all over the lotion. For this method, I just slowly scooped the lotion out of the bowl and scraped it into the bottle, making sure to leave an air pocket so the lotion could slide down and not bottleneck. This was surprisingly fast and I lost very little product.
For Essential Oil
I have a lot of random things around, like pipettes and empty perfume vials and bottles. Meant for decanting larger bottles if AG and I want to share a scent. So I used a pipette to pull up a large portion of essential oil from the bottle and then delicately and carefully added 3 drops. Essential oil is SO concentrated and you need to be really careful when interacting with it- it can really agitate your skin if it’s sensitive and you’re not careful.
After stirring the crap out of it, I filled a sandwich bag with the lotion. We found bags that were biodegradable and lacked oils on the bag to preserve them. I snipped off the corner of the bag and left the bag unzipped so air could escape. This was incredibly quick, but I feel like I lost a lot more product. But still really easy. And in the grand scheme of lost product, it’s still less than a full use overall.
After I stirred them all, I shoved them back on the shelf. About once a day, I would grab the bottles, shake them around, and then give them a good sniff. They smell fantastic. I might need to add a little bit more jasmine EO to its lotion, but that’s because it’s currently weirdly smelling of peaches. Can’t figure out how that happened- I’m assuming gnomes. After the smell had settled, about 3 days, they were ready for use. Of the three I’ve made so far, they’ve all turned out great, and I will definitely do this in the future when these bottles are gone.
Have any of you played at being chemist? Let us know what you used and how it turned out for you in the comments!
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